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From 26 May until 5 June, Hay-on-Wye becomes the centre of the literary world, set in the staggering beauty of the Brecon Beacons National Park. For 27 years Hay Festival has brought together writers from around the world to debate and share stories at its festival in the staggering beauty of the Welsh Borders. Hay […]
Move over Glastonbury – Dilwyn is the place to fine-tune your stage-diving technique! We recently spent our first night in Peel Cottage – not the cosy affair that you might imagine but a tiny sanctuary of calm in the debris of our building site. This consists of a single room (fully decorated) and one double […]
We have spent the last few weekends ‘drying out’. This had nothing to do with an excess of Herefordshire cider but the plumbing problems ‘on high’, the solution to which is still in the hands of our insurer and awaited quotes from builders. Given the situation our great strides of progress have been somewhat stunted and […]
Did you know that builders are magic? They do an amazing disappearing act when you’re not there and living two hours away from our ‘work in progress’ it would take telepathy or a spy camera to know whether they were on site and what exactly they were up to! A fortnight before Christmas we walked […]
This is a bit of a retrospective one – it’s taken me a few weeks to get over the shock – but our lovely little cottage had a problem…it’s huge base timber was rotten. We discovered this after inviting a timber specialist to advise us on cleaning up the interior beams and he offered to […]
Shopping is a bit like food – great if you can enjoy and savour occasional indulgences but one big blow out can leave you feeling a little queasy. At the moment there’s some high-impact activity on the credit card front. It’s amazing how much there is to buy when refurbing an old place – the things that you […]
It was a bleak vision. Opening the door of our little cottage for the first of our progress checks on Saturday we were met with a gutted shell – layers peeled back, dark and unwelcoming, a pool of water dripping on to what should be the kitchen floor. We’ve been here before when refurbishing property – […]
Fans of Man About the House and the Good Life look away now. The 1970’s decor of Peel Cottage is now a thing of the past. Its burnt umber tones, highly present in the kitchen with painted cork tiles and matching units were swept away with the arrival of a skip and our builder, Darren, on Monday. We […]
We are now the official ‘owners’ of a chocolate-box cottage in Dilwyn, Herefordshire. I say owners, of course that’s really the building society, but we have happily taken on the custodianship of 300+ years of history with the intention of refurbishing it for our very own holiday home. It is a bijou residence, a cosy […]
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