We had a very productive Sunday. After packing up all the Christmas decorations and taking out our trees. We had the annual problem of what to do with the one without roots, enter the chain saw! I cut it up into little pieces and we took it down to the council waste depot, after which we rewarded ourselves with a bite to eat. Coming back to Mill Cottage we planted the other tree in the front garden with the plan that if it survives we will decorate it with lights next year.

The next task was to have yet another go at sorting out the water that is collecting by the front of the garage when it rains heavily, this is not a major problem but it does make getting out of the car for the driver a tad tricky. I think that we will have to bite the bullet and dig a proper drain there sometime, but will probably wait until we have a digger on site.

The little sitting room now looked very bare as it had always had cards in the book shelf there ever since we moved in, so we decided to unbox a few of our books to make it look a bit more homely, my goodness do we have a lot of books still!

Feeling adventurous I thought it wound be a good time to tackle the job that I had been putting off until after the festivities, and that is to open up a bit of the end wall of the sitting room to see what was behind the fireplace. The first hole showed that we were in the right spot so I enlarged it, although we could see that there was in fact a large stone lintel over the fireplace as hoped we still could not see all of it. We enlarged the hole further, the hole now was about four foot by one foot six and revealed a beautiful stone lintel approx 8 foot long and two foot high! We spent the rest of the evening mulling over the best way to show this off. We are now waiting for the stove fitter to come and take a look to see what he thinks is best.

Exciting stuff this renovation lark !