It’s been a funny sort of week.  I really, truly, honestly was intending to get the hall decorated, but I lost most of Monday having to go into town, Tuesday we had a dumping of snow and I ended up hauling 45kg of sheep lick quarter of a mile down the road on my garden trolley and bringing a couple of bales of hay for the horses on the return trip, which left me rather too knackered to do much else physical,  and on Wednesday I went down to feed the sheep, intending to get started, and found Dougie there, which was a nice surprise.

He came back Thursday and Friday morning as well, so that was the week gone for painting, as I’d have been in his way, but we do have the electrics mostly done and dusted now.  Still outstanding are a special 15amp inline fuse for the oven, which is not standard and he’s had to order, earthing to the pipework in the bathroom, and the outside electrics.  He’s making up a board for the power to the byre, which I’m going to have to clear out next week, as he’s unlikely to be able to get into the first one to fit the board at the moment, from memory there’s rather a lot of junk in there.

Also this week, Colin Chessor’s came out and fitted the satellite dish on Thursday, which meant I had to buy a TV licence finally.  At least no more stern letters from TV Licensing 🙂  BT is coming on Thursday to get the phone line installed, but Openreach asked if they could come this week and do some work, as the original line to the house had been reallocated to someone else and they needed to do some rewiring.  Because of the snow, Jamie couldn’t find the access point nearest the house, but we’re now wired up as far as the corner of Ronald’s field and he’s left my line clearly labelled for the BT engineer to hook up on Thursday.  Hopefully.

I’ve been meaning to get the electricity key meter swapped out for a credit meter as well, because I’d always thought that pre-paid electricity was more expensive, so I rang SSE on Wednesday to arrange it.  They took all my details, asked what the house was used for, ran some calculations, and worked out that I’d be about £55 better off a year by sticking with the key, as the credit tariffs have changed and the key tariff hasn’t.  So I shall just have to add a tick box to my changeover checklist to make sure that there’s at least £50 credit on the meter before each new guest arrives.

Saturday’s job was a bit more of a fun one – head up the hill behind the house and try and take a decent marketing shot of the house in the snow, showing its wider position.  Sadly I missed the blue sky in the morning (we were in town), but Joyce had her drone up taking footage of the village and though it’s mainly her fields and the beach, she’s very kindly given me a USB stick with the raw footage on so that I can edit together a promo video to show that Armadale is just as pretty in winter.  She’s also offered to come and fly the drone over the point and take some specific footage of Ethel’s for me when we have some green grass, blue skies and sunshine again.  In the meantime, this was my best effort!