Time Passes.

Stripe Study in its natural habitat - the study.

The kitchen is still a work in progress but as we nipped off to London in the middle of the DIY and added new plans to the initial ( simple and fast ) plan, that's only to be expected.  Things are looking up though, the flooring has gone. The kitchen had been covered in carpet tiles the texture of pot scourers in a particularly rotten shade of brown. The tiles were there when I moved in about fourteen years ago and I hated them on sight. The hatred was mutual, I swear the only thing keeping these horrors on the floor was spite. Spite and the spills of a million dinners. Whoever thought that carpet in a kitchen was a good idea? Certainly no-one who lives with a cat who likes to drag his food out of the bowl and kill it all over again.

With this sense of colour I really should be banned from any decorating choices.

So, the removal of the stupidest floor covering in the world is a joy to behold.  No more hoovering up the debris of my baking escapades and no more stamping tiles back into position after Magnus' natty little claws have dislodged them in a post-prandial frenzy. At the moment the floor is wearing a  few crumpled newspapers and bit of half sawn timber. If I tell you that it is a vast improvement on the tiles, you'll get an idea of how awful they were.

These worktops will never be so clean again.

As Dylan Thomas once said:  Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Some plates and a couple of bannetons.

Time has indeed passed and it is all over bar the flooring. The cupboard doors have returned to their rightful places and the newly painted shelves are looking spic and span and not a little Scandanavian with the white crockery piled on top. We have been eating our dinners in comfort and drinking our morning coffee in company with the birds who look in on us from from the silver birch in the garden. We're on the first floor and it is a very tall tree.
In all of the excitement I forgot to mention that I've been knitting. Along with many others, I've been hooked by Veera Malimaki's simple but stunning designs and I knitted a Stripe Study Shawl in between snoozing and being on cup of tea duty in the kitchen. I love it even though some of the yarn ( dated 1941 ) gave off an ominous smell of mothballs after washing. The smell has gone thankfully,  and my shawl is gorgeous.

This is the big tree. I'm very fond of him.