Three sisters Sunday, 30-May-21 21:48:44 CEST

The north wall of the staircase Sunday, 13-Jun-21 22:22:38 CEST

Sunday, 06-Jun-21 20:41:48 CEST

Our sheep arrived

This week our sheep arrived and we got a sink in the workshop.

Monday 31 May

We usually don’t go to the new house on Mondays, but it is nice weather, and we got a special mission – to finish the task we started yesterday. Two of the seed sorts we received need to be soaked in water overnight before being sowed so we had them in water and now they are ready. When we arrived at the new house, we planted the soaked seeds. There is no point in making a photo of soil with newly sowed seeds because it looks the same as soil with no seeds. This is good because now the vegetable garden is ready to grow.

In the house, we started mounting a gypsum plate on the south wall of the workshop. That is where we will have the sink as well, so the isolation material had to be crafted carefully. If it is too bulky behind the plate, it will crack, and we don’t want that.

I press the isolation material against the pipes to make dents. Then I am carving out the dents with a Stanley knife. The pattern of pipes was incredibly elaborate here, so I had to repeat this method several times.

Then comes the holes in the plate. Where should they be? For that, we are measuring the distance from the top and right this time. I made a note of the measurements, not an especially careful note but a note nevertheless.

The measurements of the holes are transferred to the plate, and then holes are drilled. Actually, we stopped drilling holes in the gypsum. We draw the shape, and then we use our electric jigsaw machine. That is somehow much quicker. Then the plate is finished, and we can put up the plate.

It was late when we came back to our old home. We slept wonderfully well.

Tuesday 1 June

It is already June! We had regular work for the employer, but I had a little excursion to get my vaccine jab. This location had much more traffic compared to the place where my wife got her vaccine last Wednesday. Here they even had several guards guiding the cars. My wife waited for me in the car while I went to get my vaccine jab.

I had to bring a form with answers to questions if I had any allergies, etc. I think I answered no to all questions. I am apparently healthy. They also wanted to see my legitimation and the invitation, and I had to wear a mask. There were two queues, and I was asked to go into the Johnson and Johnson queue.

The queue went into a temporary building, a kind of tent.

When it was my turn, I had to go to a counter with a lady verifying that I had the form filled in. She checked my ID and my invitation. In the Netherlands, people got a social security number, and I presented that as well. With that, I passed all checks, and my form got a green dot, and I was ready to get the vaccine. For the vaccine, I was asked to take place in a new queue.

Somehow there was no issue with people standing too close behind me like they do in the hardware store. People are more aware that we are dealing with a pandemic here. It has happened in a supermarket that I turned around and begged people to give me some distance; it has worked up until now.

After a couple of minutes of waiting, it was my turn. The doctor or nurse checked my papers one more time. He verified if I had the green dot and if all questions were answered with no. Then he asked me if I wanted the vaccine in the left arm or the right arm. I decided on the right arm. I am double-handed, so it does not matter. I could feel a slight sting. It was more than nothing, but it did not hurt much at all.

After the jab, I got a sticker on my arm. The doctor asked me to go to the waiting room and wait fifteen minutes. If I had not got any allergic reactions within fifteen minutes, I could leave by myself. I went to the waiting room, where a guide showed me an empty booth. The booths had room for one chair, and the sides were made of clear plastic. I sat there and made a selfie with the sticker on my arm. Then I left the temporary building after fifteen minutes. It was a warm day.

I drove home and continued working.

After work, we went to the new house! We gave the newly sowed seeds water and weeded some thistles. Then we finished the south wall of the workshop. That means we have finished the whole work area where our plumber and ventilation specialist must do work. The sink can be mounted, and the ventilation pipe can be mounted along with the ceiling. Here is a panorama photo of the south wall with the sink and the west wall with the door. Now we only got the part next to the door on the west wall.

The easter wall cannot be done yet because the electrician needs to finish his work there, but we have not seen him for a long time. As long as we are not held up by his absence, we are fine, but he will hear from us if we cannot continue without his help. Our plumber is very welcome to do his part on this wall now. It will be delightful to have a regular sink in the house. Perhaps we can make this corner in the workshop into a temporary kitchen. A simple little stove and perhaps even a fridge would be nice. The prospect of us perhaps sleeping over in the new house made me so happy.

 

After we finished the south wall of the workshop, we went into the garden again and pottered around. I weeded the flower garden, and my wife weeded near the pond. The guelder rose starts to flower! It has white flowers. So beautiful!

Tonight we got the message that the sheep will arrive on Thursday this week. Exciting.

 

Wednesday 2 June

This morning when I woke up, I had no idea what day of the week it was. Was it Sunday or Monday? We had been to the new house yesterday and the day before. Perhaps that was why I was confused. Today it was back to normal, just working half a day. I had so many days off on Wednesday morning I got colleagues thinking that I changed my working hours permanently, but that is not the case.

While I did my office work at our old house, I had the door open to the garden. It was sunny and warm, and a great tit was singing while bumblebees collected nectar in the yellow poppy flowers.

I recorded the sound. Now you wonder how I know it was a great tit. I downloaded the app BirdNET, and it analyzed the sound and said it was a great tit. I think that is a plausible conclusion.

At lunchtime, we went to the new house. We brought a batch of flowers from our old garden. There were some poppy, geranium, etc., but I never knew the name of all of the plants. I will figure it out someday.

We finished the west wall of the workshop. Now three walls of the workshop got gypsum plates. The east wall needs electricity before we close the wall, so that has to wait. We can continue on other walls in the meantime.

When the wall was finished, we went to a garden center and bought extra food for our sheep that will arrive tomorrow. They need some extra supplements for minerals they would get too little of when digesting the grass. We noted the supplement contained both palm oil and soybeans. Next time we could perhaps get a supplement without palm oil because we are against palm oil. I think I can live with the soybeans, but palm oil is problematic. We will see. If there is no alternative, then there is not.

We also bought a T connection for the water tap so that both of us can give water at the same time. Besides that, we bought a garden fork that will come in handy.

These rapeseed plants are growing at least one decimeter every day. In a couple of days, you cannot see my wife behind the plants. Here she is collecting some flower stems from the rapeseed for having in a salad.

At the end of the day, I planted the plants we brought earlier today, and I gave them water via the new T connection. It was handy. There is still much to weed in the flower garden, but this will do for now.

Thursday 3 June

Today we had a regular day working from our old home—kind of. During the lunch break, we relocated our office to the new house. Later in the afternoon, the ladies would arrive.

	The trailer with the sheep arrives.
	We are ready to let them out.
	The hatch is open.
	The first sheep comes out of the trailer.
	Soon after comes the next.
	The last lamb also wants to be we the others and joins the first two.
	Here they are looking like, “What should we do?”
	Clearly, the first two keep taking the lead.
	We found one of the lambs is more curious than the other two. The curious have a number tag forming a palindrome. We are thinking of giving this sheep a name that is a palindrome too.

 

Unloading was done really quickly, actually. The sheep got acquainted with the place and started eating with a smacking sound. They were happier when we were around, but they relax and lie down and eat if we are gone.

We continued working on our laptops until the battery of my laptop was empty. Then we went to our old home and finished the working day. After supper, we went back and looked after the sheep again. They were glad to see us. We watered the vegetable garden and the flower garden. Everything is growing like crazy right now. The soil still got some moisture from the last rain, and it is warm. Hence it is growing very well.

Friday 4 June

Today we had a regular working day. We worked from our old home in the morning. We relocated to our new house during lunch—this time, I brought an extra monitor and the charger for my laptop, absolutely essential.

I sat in the hobby room on the first floor and my wife in the living room. We got Internet, telephone, electricity, and a coffee machine so what more do you need to carry out work?

Outside the window, I could hear the sheep from time to time. When the lambs thought they got some attention, they got louder, but when we were working and minding our own business, they were calm and lay down.

When we arrived today, our plumber had already arrived. He worked on the sink in the workshop. It is so nice when we can use the water from the sink. It felt like a superior luxury to wash hands above a sink instead of a bucket. We are so pleased with this new feature of our house.

We worked elsewhere in the house, and our plumber worked in the workshop. It was okay to combine. After the sink, he prepared the ventilation pipe to feed fresh air from the outside into our heat recovery ventilation system. We figured out how this pipe would go on 8 March. The final product looks identical to our design. Our plumber was happy with the research we had done into how this pipe would be installed.

We discovered that the corn is sticking out of the ground already in our vegetable garden. The seeds must be spring-loaded to be able to do it this quickly.

Saturday 5 June

It was 20 degrees and overcast the whole day. It could rain according to the forecast, but that did not happen. We decided to work outside, on the house. It is not so lovely to work outside when it is too hot, so this was perfect. Overcast is not that bad for working on the house. There are details around the windows we still need to finish. A couple of days ago, Sunday 30 May, I applied foam in the corners. Today my wife cut away the excess foam, painted the surfaces. I mounted horizontal planks above the windows.

I had forgotten one corner, so I had to squeeze in more foam in one corner of a window. As long as one is cleaning the nozzle of the foam bottle you can use the foam several times. I clean it with acetone. If I had not done that, a bottle could just be used once, and that would be a pity, indeed.

Tomorrow I can start finishing the window sills for the windows.

Today we went to neighbors to have a look at their floor tiles. We need to figure out how we will do with floortiles as well. They had lovely tiles, but they also had a garbage container. There were lots of exciting things. I asked if I could do a dumpster dive, and that was all fine. I took out a couple of nice plates from their garbage. I used one as a roof of the sheep house. I can use another as a temporary desk for when I am working in the new house.

We worked on the north wall of the hall on the ground floor. The isolation and the cables bulged out a little too much. Until now, we only removed excess isolation, but here we figured it would be nice to screw the cables into place so that all fit nicely. It is good to have a picture of this place if we are ever going to put something on this wall.

Sunday 6 June

It was glorious weather today. We decided to do some work on the house’s exterior, finishing the windows and working a little inside the house. I put together the work area I need for hammering on window sills.

Our sheep welcomed us, but after a while, they settled munching on their grass. The plate on top of their house was perfect for giving them shadow.

I need many tools to work on the window sills. I already had the measurements for the sills, so I had no reason to climb around testing the sills. I finished two window sills today. It took a long time to set things up, and working with this sun in my back was not optimal.

A girl in a pink glitter gown, glitter shoes, and a glitter tiara on her head visited us in the morning. She was out walking with her grandpa. Since they showed interest in the sheep, I asked them to come in. She walked inside the fence, but after a few steps, she noticed sheep poo. She got paralyzed and could not stand it; she had to back out. All her interest in the sheep was gone. She said she would consider coming back when the poo was gone. In a year or two, probably she will be looking after a horse, and this stigma against poo is long gone. I thought all this was funny.

My wife started painting a second layer of the corners. The corner I foamed yesterday, she cut out the excess foam. Unfortunately, the foam I sprayed yesterday had settled with large bubbles, so I sprayed more foam into this corner. It is never going to end, is it?

Suddenly, two different families arrived at the same time wanted to look at the sheep. There was also a girl with a glitter gawn in this group, but this girl was much more sensible. After the experience this morning of a girl in a glitter dress, I did not know what to expect, but this glitter girl liked the sheep and wanted to know more about them.

In this group, there was also a young boy that was a bit suspective. After a while, he also wanted to feel the fur of a sheep.

Our three young ladies behaved very well. My wife handed out three buckets of extra feed that the group could feed to our sheep.

After the visit, I continued working on the window sills, but it was a bit too hot in the sun for my liking. We went inside and continued working on gypsum plates. We finished the north wall in the hall. Then we started putting up green gypsum plates in the washing room on the ground floor. It was tricky to get the green plate behind water pipes mounted in the ceiling, so I moved one pipe a little.

I tried making a photo of the north wall of the hall but since we got a door with a big window you can only see the outside and not the wall on the photo so I am not including the photo here.

When we finished the gypsum plate, we went to our old home to eat dinner. After dinner, we went back to our new home to hunt for snails. Last night, we were visited by a particularly hungry snail that ate on our sprouting vegetables in our vegetable garden. We hope to find that snail because we really want our garden to be able to sprout before it is eaten. We can see the three sisters are coming up in the garden. It is nice.

This was the week when our sheep came. We got the sink in the workshop. The vegetable garden started to sprout.