Goodness gracious, it's awful cold today...I found an old throw yesterday that I chopped up a bit to fit across the back door and Himself put it up with hooks...it has made a difference to the persistent draughts.
We had the windows at the front of the cottage and the front door replaced a couple of years ago...don't know why we didn't have the back door done at the same time...
The front windows were sash...they'd long lost their cords and had to be hammered up when we wanted to open them and then propped in place with a couple of old books...Eilis used to wriggle through the gap and leap into the front garden...had visions of her getting squished if the books were to have moved at all...
The internal doors don't look too bad so long as you squint a bit...they fit reasonably well anyway. They were painted a deep sludgy sort of brown colour when we moved in so I armed myself with the hot air gun and a scraper and set to...it wouldn't budge. All I was doing was scorching the paint...so away I went and bought a bottle of paint stripper. The sort that bubbles ominously when you lather it on...
And I scraped and scraped...ran out of the stripper so bought some more. Started again. Cleaned the door down with white spirit and layered on more stripper...after several days of scrubbing with wire wool ,scraping and more stripper, I saw a faint black mark...and then another one and the paint eventually came off in a thick gooey layer...to reveal 'Produce of Ceylon'...the bathroom door was made from tea chests.
The ceiling is narrow wooden boards that are horribly bowed...whoever it was that grew tired of bits of thatch falling in their dinner and decided to put a ceiling up cut down on the cost by putting the joists about four foot apart...those boards were much the same grungy brown colour but there was no way on earth was I going to start with the paint stripper while balanced on our tallest ladder...so I slapped white paint on. The following day the paint had disappeared and the brown had come through...so I put another coat on...same thing happened.
Scrub it with caustic soap, said a neighbour...have you ever tried scrubbing a ceiling while balancing a bucket of warm water, a cloth and scrubbing brush and the bar of caustic soap? Didn't think you had...another neighbour said take all the boards down and soak them in a bog hole for a couple of weeks...I closed the front door and wedged a chair under the handle so no more neighbours could put their heads round the door with helpful advice and bought a huge tin of masonry paint and painted the ceiling with that...about six times.
There's huge flag stone in front of the original hearth...the range is sitting on it now. I really, really wanted to pull it up to see what was underneath but Himself wouldn't entertain the idea...it was the custom to bury a donkeys head under the hearthstone you see...it was said to warn of strangers coming and to make the sound of the dancers boots louder and clearer...a donkey's head was often put under the stone used for threshing the grain...and believe it or not there is a vague scientific theory behind that custom... which I've completely forgotten.
If you didn't happen to have a deceased donkey about, you could use a goats head instead...we were friendly with a young couple who bought a cottage away up the hill...they found a goats leg in each corner of the main room...under the earthen floor. The goats skull was under the hearthstone...the shelf inside the chimney had a collection of old horse shoes...
Another couple we knew found a pair of breeches on the little stone shelf inside their chimney...proper buttoned knee breeches...tiny pearl buttons fastening the sides and where they fitted just below the knee...but they crumbled and disintegrated into a small pile of ruined fabric.
We found an old tin bucket on the shelf in our chimney...all squashed out of shape and not much use anymore.
Put there for luck perhaps...or maybe the breeches had got wet and they were tucked away to get dry and then forgotten about...the bucket makes little sense, though horseshoes are still thought of as lucky today. But we put them upside down unlike the English way of right side up...we don't care to think of the Faerie making them into boats you see...
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The Cost And Practical Side Of My Shed...
Make sure you disinfect your shopping. 
