Roads to Joy

In a previous blog post, I waxed enthusiastic at the prospect of minimal building work over this coming year. I felt delighted that we might contemplate settling in and living, rather than preparing for the lifestyle we’d hoped for. I forgot how much fun it is to plan and to anticipate the renovations, and then to see them emerge, whole, into the house. I forgot the dreaming phase, which is a whole other joy.

Just now, having actually begun all our forays into last year’s building work with an extended patio to accommodate a greenhouse that, we told ourselves, would be in place by the spring of that year, we’re looking out of our kitchen window and beginning to dream again of that lovely greenhouse sited perfectly to house a little ‘kitchen garden.’ So many other projects got in the way of that simple plan, but now we can dream of it again.

I was so excited by the prospect that this morning, after my regular stint washing the main floor of the town hall (doubtless to be the subject of another ‘joy of service’ entry), that I set to and re-organised the new patio space which had been cluttered with wooden benches and side tables. We’d had to clear these bits of furniture away from the site where the heat pumps now live, and we’d never put them back. And then I swept the place so that it would be open and ready to accommodate our dreaming.

I can certainly picture the greenhouse, sitting prettily on the level blocks, filled with tomato plants and salad leaves, a hanging basket or three. Perhaps a series of french beans reaching up to the top, which did so well in our large polytunnel back on the high North Pennines fellside.

We’ll need to dream this all up pretty fast, though, as the greenhouse sale lasts until only the end of this month! If we should make the dream a reality, it will be up to me to put the flat-pack kit together, when it arrives.

And that will be a whole other combination of joys.