Every girl needs a woodshed to have fun in and if it isn’t quite the way Lady Chatterley would have had in mind, I am going to enjoy mine just as much, well once we have put the door on anyway! For clarity, Lady Chatterley of DH Lawrence fame, would meet her game keeper for frolics in the woodshed, but ours is to be a little more formal, and now houses our collection of tools and ever increasing timber finds, which we hope will turn into beautiful things.

We have been in France only a short while and needed to get straight. Many visits dragging procession here had filled the barn to bursting and we couldn’t get a foot in to even think about renovating it.  Something had to go.

So we built a workshop and a quirky woodshed, which I think looks like an outside loo [hopefully the mayor wont raise an eyebrow to our ablutions] and a timber shed in the garden for all the garden clearance. At the moment the bugs love it and its become more of a hotel for all things creepy crawly.  No rent charged.

For the record, I hate heights. I fell down some stairs when I was around two and since then anything above knee height is knee knocking.  But sometimes you have to be brave and as I have to get up and fix the barn chimney soon, I had better get braver quicker!

I don’t know if its a man thing but this timber shed is to house fire wood for cooking.  We haven’t built the outside kitchen yet, but its on the cards and classified as priority.  The laundry room [for the girl] is a bit down the line, but it means I don’t have to wash socks for some time yet. Although with this lovely sun, we have been soaking our undies in buckets in the garden. With a temporary rope hitched up by the fence and plenty of wind blasting from the North West, this hand-washing isn’t so bad.  It saves on the electric and we don’t yet have any hot water.  The idea is to rely on solar and filter rain water.  We have already filled a 500 litre barrel in one heavy downpour and this feeds the compost heap and for general use round the house, for plants, for washing buckets.

We have a very tight financial budget and this means allocating no more than around £50.00 per month for electric and water.  Self sustaining for up to 60% of our food is another aim, with vegetables being the mainstay of cooking and my home made breads. [see http://www.peppertony.com in the next few months for more about gluten free bread, vegan bread and non yeast and non grain breads].

Heating is a huge problem here due to the cold winters, a regular minus thirteen degrees.  In the summer its very hot, a dry heat up to forty seven degrees. This creates various issues – keeping warm and keeping cool, watering the plants and garden in a drought, keeping from freezing in the Winter when we have no central heating system.

That is our summer challenge to be fixed by October. But for now, I am a happy Tom Boy girl and I am off to play with my boys toys in the shed.