I Started Over in my 30s - This is what my days look like now

Hello Chooks! Stop pecking at my toes! I've got another three eggs to add to my collection. I had planned on recording a kind of sunrise to sunset day in my life video this week except the sun's rising at 4am at the moment and I'm really tired so that isn't happening and I'm doing a regular day in the life instead. I did film some footage after the sunrise this morning but then I went back to bed. I've usually got a big list of things I'd like to get done in the day and today is no different but it's shaping up to be quite a hot one and I don't do my best work in the heat so we'll see how I get on. I'm making no promises. Elderflowers might be one of my favourite things to forage for. These will get turned into cordial as soon as it's cooled down I picked up some secondhand barrels on Facebook Marketplace a couple of weeks ago and after a few people warned me not to let them dry out or the staves will fall away from the metal rings, I planted three of them up over the weekend in my vegetable patch and one of them's got peas in, another has leeks and the last one has a squash plant in it. But I've got one left to go and I want to get that planted up because I'm going on holiday in a couple of weeks and while it's all well and good to ask my neighbours if they wouldn't mind throwing a couple of watering cans around the garden if we have a run of dry days, asking them to water my barrels for me is a bit weird even for me. So I'm gonna plant it up in front of the cottage, try and tidy up this area a little bit because I haven't really touched it since I moved in. All of my strawberry plants are here and my chimney are and that's just where the removal guys unloaded them when they were taking everything out of the moving van. So I'm gonna tidy it up a little bit and probably put some more strawberry plants in this last barrel and hopefully it won't dry out when I'm away. How any of you have managed to grow strawberries when you're all full of weeds is an absolute miracle. This chimney has seen better days. I don't use it very often and it's full of cracks. I'm not really sure where I'm going to move it to but it was my mum's so I don't really want it to fall apart when I pick it up. Especially as it would have been her birthday tomorrow and this was probably a birthday present to her from my dad about 20 years ago. I think the weeds might be my most abundant crop. In case anyone's interested in how my to-do list for the day is going, this job wasn't even on it which is kind of standard practice for me really. In my defense I was gonna do some cooking and baking today but it's really quite warm and my kitchen gets quite a lot of sunlight unlike the rest of the house so it is a bit like a greenhouse in there today. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. What have we got that won't be useful for anything else? I could just fill the barrel up with brassica stalks. All these strawberry plants were a gift from one of my neighbours and they are very much appreciated. Okay that looks a bit tidier. This area won't stay like this. I want to put a little cast iron table and chairs here at some point when I can find a good second hand set and most of these strawberry plants are in their third season so their productivity will drop off from next year and I'll probably replace most of the plants with runners I take this year but for now it's a little bit tidier and that's good enough for me. I think I've earned a strawberry after all that. It's not perfectly ripe but it'll do. Nothing is better than a homegrown strawberry. I've had a quick break to reapply sunscreen and drink some of last year's homemade elderflower cordial which still tastes really good even though it's a year old. Chooks I've got a whole bucket of weeds for you to peck at. The chickens are doing an excellent job with their compost contributions. They get to peck through all of the seedy weeds and bits of dead plant and things that I've pulled out of the ground and kind of kick start everything and turn it all over before I add it into the regular compost bins and it helps it break down a little bit faster. I had a couple of compost bins in here made of old pallet collars but I decided I wanted them to grow a comfrey patch in in the vegetable garden so I knocked a little compost bin together out of some of the worst of the sarking boards that I had in the barn and it seems to be fine so far. I wanted to thank everyone for the lovely messages I got on last week's video where I talked about my renovation plans. I was quite nervous to post it I'm not really sure what I was expecting maybe 200,000 people to say uh Jude you promised us a renovation we've been waiting for ages we're bored we give up and I got lots of lovely responses to everything I was saying so I really really appreciate it. I am almost 99% certain that I'm going to go ahead with my smaller scaled back plan. It's going to take a while because I am going to have to do all of the paperwork the planning commission and the building warrant stuff again which isn't ideal but it is what it is and it will be worth it in the end I think. There were a few people who said knock it down and start over. I am absolutely not averse to doing a build from scratch project and especially now I've got a bit more experience with life in the countryside but if I was going to do that this isn't the plot that I would have bought to do it on. I really like the cottage as a building and also this is a very sloping plot it does get a lot of sunlight which is lovely but it's not ideal for putting loads of buildings on which is one of the reasons I'm taking a shed down in a couple of weeks so I can build a new shed rather than just putting one in a different spot because there's a lot of sloping and everything would require quite a lot of landscaping. A few people said if it's not going to be your forever home then find something that is going to be your forever home and that would probably be the most financially sensible decision but I am not in a place at the moment where I have the energy to start over again. It is really really exhausting and moving in general is stressful but moving somewhere alone on your own obviously that's what alone means and starting over in a new place where you don't know anyone is really hard and I kind of struck gold when I moved here because my neighbours are incredible and the community is lovely and I feel like I've been welcomed into it which is great and I don't have the energy to do that again at the moment so I'm gonna rebuild I'm gonna work on what I've got already where I am and in the future maybe I will go and build something from scratch on a great big parcel of land somewhere and have a new project but that is probably five to ten years down the line so I'm gonna make the best of what I've got here and I think I should be able to make something wonderful. I've been trying to make a list of all the things I can tackle without needing a building warrant. Annoyingly there's not that much. Things like moving the bathroom which is something I'd want to do quite early on would require moving the soil pipe which is a building warrant job. Putting dormer windows in the roof so I can then do the re-insulation of the roof also a building warrant job. I can do things like repointing. All of the granite needs repointing which will be quite a long and tedious job but is a job that I will be able to do on my own so that's on the list. I can get the place rewired which I will not be doing myself for legality and competency reasons but I definitely need a rewire so I can organise that and looking into replacing my boiler and my oil tank and things like that. My original plan with the renovation was to put an air source heat pump in and have solar panels on the roof and underfloor heating. I am hopefully still going to be able to put some solar panels on the roof which will be great. Eventually I will probably put a new roof on the barn because it has seen better days and I'll be able to put some solar panels across both bits of roof but I am not going to be able to insulate the property well enough to be able to make an air source heat pump efficient. So I'm probably going to have to replace my oil boiler which is about 20 years old with a newer oil boiler and a newer oil tank because the last time someone came to look at my boiler they said my oil tank didn't meet the current building code so I need to look into that. That's another job for the list and I might be able to put my wood... I will be able to put my wood-burning stove in, I just need to decide when I want to do that because currently my only way of heating up my water is by having a fire and if I put a wood-burning stove in I will lose the back boiler that I have on my fire. So yeah I need to make some decisions but there are a few things I will be able to do with the house while I'm waiting. My first plan though is to continue with my shed project because I want to get that done in time for the winter so I've got somewhere dry to store everything over the winter and then maybe I can start doing a few things inside the barn but we'll see. It's going to be an adventure and it's one that I don't really have a plan for which isn't... well I say isn't how I operate but apparently since I've moved here it is how I operate. Maybe that's why I've been so stressed. I've been making a kind of nettle tea fertilizer to use on some of my leafy vegetables and the bag of nettles has been sitting in water for a few weeks now so it's ready to decant into plastic bottles and start using on the plants but it smells foul even with the sheet of plastic on the top that I've been using for a lid so I'm not really looking forward to this job but hopefully it'll be good for the plants and I'll just have to breathe through my mouth. This is exactly the sort of job that I would like to be wearing gloves for but I've only got one pair of rubber gloves and I need them to do the washing up with because I have to do the washing up with boiling water from the kettle and it's too hot to do without gloves. It's also quite difficult to talk without breathing through your nose which I'm trying to avoid. I've made a batch of this once before but I just chopped up the nettles and put them loose in the water so I had to strain off the liquid when I wanted to use it but this time I chopped up the nettles and I put them in an organza bag which I'm not going to try and lift out it's weighed down by a couple of bricks which means I can just scoop out the liquid which makes it a lot easier. There's still some bits in it but I'm not drinking it so it's fine. I'm hopeful that this time next year I'll have enough comfrey to make a comfrey tea fertiliser because it's really good for fruiting plants but I'm sure this will come in handy. I'm going to dilute some to use on my kale when I water it this evening. I might tip the rest of this into the compost because I think four litres of grim is probably more than enough. I'm getting a bit hot so I'm going to go inside and put my elderflowers into soak and do some computer work while I cool down a little bit. Elderflower cordial is pretty straightforward to make, it's just elderflowers, sugar, lemons, water and citric acid and you put everything apart from the sugar in a pan, heat it to boiling point, turn it off, leave it overnight, take out all of the flowers and the lemons, add in the sugar, boil it again, let it simmer for a while and then put it into bottles. I made some last year and people panicked about the amount of sugar in it. It does have quite a lot of sugar in but I find most of the best things do. I've had a shower to cool down and consumed quite a lot of liquid. It's half past six, I've got about four hours of daylight left so I'm gonna head back outside and try and tick some more things off my list. I really need to put in some kind of irrigation next summer because watering the garden is a job that takes ages. I've been waiting for a dry evening to use my new garden incinerator for ages and I think that's a sentence that might have aged me by about 20 years. I've got loads of bags of invasive weeds that I've been pulling up over the last couple of months and I don't want to put them straight in my compost because I really don't want more ground elder or other bits and pieces sprouting up everywhere so I'm gonna burn them and then put the ash in the compost because that sounds like a good plan. Although looking at the amount of stuff I've got to burn I'm not sure if I need a garden incinerator or a crematorium. It's ten o'clock and the sun's just about gone down and I think I'm done for the day. I've got to tidy up out here and then go inside for another shower because I'm filthy and I smell of smoke. I'm not really sure what I've achieved today and I haven't looked at my to-do list for hours which is pretty standard but I've been working for about 13 hours so it's probably time to go inside. See you next weekend.