Friday 14th August
It’s been a very busy week.
On Saturday morning after shopping, we’d promised our neighbours that we’d pop up to look at their new house in the village. While we were there, Martin mentioned that a house had come up for sale again having previously been for sale briefly, at the end of the road. We did a drive past and looked it up online. It had nearly all our criteria. A large double length garage, a large boarded loft with velux windows, a nice kitchen/dining room, 3 bedrooms, large lounge with log burner, oil fired central heating, off road parking, a nice back garden with a lovely summerhouse with heat and electricity and a pond with coy carp.
We arranged a viewing for Monday and really liked it and put an offer in on Tuesday which was accepted.
The great thing is that despite being on an estate it’s a corner plot and it’s in the village with everything on our doorstep including our beach and castle!! So we’re off again on the journey. The sellers (who we know from the pub) are moving into an empty property and so there’s no chain but these things still take forever but we have recent experience and info that we’d gathered for the previous house.
Natasha has taken a liking to the summerhouse and I’m happy to have the garage as my studio. It has access from the house and a door to the garden. It has windows, electricity and water and work benches, and shelving and plenty of room. So watch this space…
We took George in for his m.o.t this week. That was so convenient as it was only 1 junction down the A1 from where he’s stored. He passed which is fantastic as we need him for AITG and The Lindisfarne Festival the week afterwards.
I spent Monday painting the “charity picture” which I’m auctioning at AITG for my friend Ian’s North Northumberland Hospice Charity. It’s predictably a view of the bay and castle (see photo with blog). It’s now varnished and ready to go.
On Tuesday, I painted 8 watercolours for Jetty Gallery and on Wednesday I mounted and cello wrapped them, packed them along with 20 cards and Natasha posted them on Thursday.
On Wednesday I collected 3 old A boards from The Greys which I intend to renovate and repaint for AITG signage. Unfortunately my chalkboard paint had dried up so I couldn’t do that this week. I diverted my attention to mounting watercolours for AITG in my studio. I kept finding stuff that I had in various portfolios all over my studio and ended up spending all day doing it and got in a bit of a tangle with it. I’m trying to stay calm but there’s only 2 weeks to go. I think I’m on top of it at the moment. I have loads of stuff but time goes so quickly.
I do not want my event to be like our “eclipse experience“ this week which I’m sorry to say was a huge anti-climax here with too much cloud. It certainly wasn’t the eerie experience of the 1999 eclipse when the birds stopped singing and a strange sepia glow spread across the landscape. To be honest, this time, it just looked like it was going to rain!