Spring has arrived and that means – hurrah! – our first visitors have arrived. We welcomed two very old (as in long-standing!) friends last week. We’ve had many experiences with them – they were our neighbours in West Didsbury, we went to their wedding in Greece and have shared many parties and late, late nights […]
You know when your car tax, insurance and MOT all fall at the same time? It’s a hassle isn’t it? Getting the car booked into the garage, crossing your fingers that it’s OK, getting online to renew the insurance etc. We used to think it was a big hassle – but now, having just done […]
We know what bad weather is like. We know what winter is like. We’re from Manchester. But, winter just gone has been something else. We’re used to dismal grey clouds, that hang over you for days/weeks on end. Rain that seems as if it will never stop. Fleeting snow – then the return of the […]
Given that work on the kitchen started way back in November, we did cut it a bit fine to greet our first guests last week. Admittedly, the scope of the project grew and grew, but we did think our friends would arrive and we’d still be kitchenless. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case and it was […]
Most people, at some stage in their lives, will embark on a renovation project. Whether it’s doing up a corner in the living room or a full blown house rebuild, it will bring its stresses. We did it fairly recently in West Didsbury. What we thought would take a few weeks, took six months, all […]
We’re so, so lucky that we are now so close to Italy. When the candle supplies are running low, we generally do a trip to IKEA in Villesse, in the province of Gorizia in the Italian region Friuli-Venezia Giulia. It’s a little bit further north than Trieste but it always seems as if we are […]
In the year that we have lived in The House, the small downstairs bathroom has gone through a number of changes. It’s not in the most ideal location, being right off The Well Room, which will eventually become another living/dining room. However, we know that we are lucky to have two bathrooms, especially with visitors […]
When we lived back in Didsbury, we often used to eat out on a Sunday – and no Sunday lunch was ever really the same, such is the variety of restaurant types in the locality. Here in Istria, we have a lot of excellent restaurants near the house, but the closest are of the agristurismo […]
Oh, didn’t I just end the last renovation blog post on a bit of a high. Loving that the undercoating was about to start in the kitchen, meaning we could almost, but not quite, see the finishing line. Well, the undercoating did start, but we fell at the first hurdle… Our house seems to be […]
We think we are now on the final hurdle, kitchen renovation wise. It seems like we’ve been living forever without a decent working kitchen we can call our own – in fact, since we sold our house in West Didsbury, back in January 2017, we’ve been making do in the kitchen area. The one we […]
Of all of the things which confound us in Croatia – and there are many, believe you me – the biggest has to be boundaries. We’ve never really had to think about boundaries before, because when we’ve bought or sold properties previously, the Land Registry has just done its thing. But we’re in Croatia now, […]
To look at our garden now, you’d think we were living on top of a rubbish tip. Which, if I’m honest, we are, as the garden has become the dumping ground for all of the stones and rubble and wood and tiles etc from the ongoing kitchen renovation. It’s actually too awful to even post […]