Garden in full swing

The garden is doing beautifully - certainly a lot better than I expected in my first year of gardening. The picture above is today's harvest for a lovely vegetable soup, the first meal made entirely out of garden produce. I'm so chuffed!

We've also had a few BBQ meals already, even tough the weather hasn't really been BBQ-friendly. But since S built it all by himself, we had to test it - and it did the job perfectly. The simple meal of beef burgers, garden potatoes and garden broad beans we had the other day was to die for!

We have also had our first ripe tomato - they are coming along slowly as we haven't had much sunshine, but they'll get there!

First harvest of broad beans:

Onions laid out to dry - this is only about a third of all my onions!

Our new house: 1 year later

We bought our house last July. After many years of renting, getting the keys to our new home was a very emotional moment for both of us. Even though the house needed a fair amount of work done to suit our needs and aesthetics, it was love at first sight and the beginning of a great adventure.

There's still many things needing done, replaced or refreshed here. We have a tight budget and have only been able to do so much. But the house is definitely liveable; we have done a great deal of painting (the previous owners had painted the master bedroom blood-red; we changed it to soothing blue. The living room was 3 different shades of metallic paint; it's now all white with just 1 grey accent wall), we've replaced dark wooden blinds with light curtains, but the biggest change has happened in the garden. A big chunk of it has been transformed into a very productive fruit & vegetable garden; the pond has been removed (for safety reasons - we loved it otherwise!), the back fence has been replaced; part of the monoblock has been removed (and partially used to build a BBQ). We won't stop there - we still have a few projects in mind :-)

This was our living room a year ago (note the silver, gold and purple metallic paint):

And here it is now:

The garden last July:

And today:

We still need to replace the carpets throughout the house; hire somebody to paint the staircase (the only bit of painting we can't do ourselves); in a few years time - replace the kitchen; maybe one day install a wood burner in the living room.. I could go on. It will take us years to do it all, but it's an awesome journey and we've been loving every part of it!