Bob & I Have A New Project: Project Pigsty!

A real outside one!!!

Just like most mothers, mine might think I am talking about our house. Honestly, does anybody ever live up to their mum's idea of a tidy household! But no, Mum you can rest assured, I am talking about our real pigsty. The one outside

Maybe I should rephrase it and call it a pig-pen because that is what it once might have been. Our homestead has lots of outbuildings ( even an outhouse ) that are in need of lots of T.L.C.

The first year after we moved here, we did fix up our house. Not just the odd paint and clean, but digging up floors and taking plaster of the walls and then putting it all back again. Might I add that Bob and I did it by hand. Digging up the floor in each room up to 70 cm is hardly a picnic...so in a way that is our excuse for being idle with the outbuildings for some time. Builder's fatigue!

But now we have the pig pen in our sights. All this talk of pets ( small and large ) has us at least making room. Did I mention that for the last few days we have had a mouse in the house. A fast little thing. When I told my mum, she quick as a button said:

" Well, instead of having a cow, you can have a mouse as a pet! "

and promptly had a big chuckle.

The entrance to our pig sty. It has been a storage area for things we needed to throw away. Out of sight, out of mind. Here in Austria one can't just throw anything into the bin. No, recycling is a law. These windows can either be thrown away like this, but then you pay a fee per glass pane, or you take out the glass and only throw away the wooden frames.

Bob did the smashing and afterwards he told me that it was quite a stress reliever to bash in the window.

Some of the windows were double glazed and even with the big hammer, Bob struggled for a few moments to break them, but you can see how he enjoyed his work!
Our new windows are triple glazed and keep cold, noise & intruders out.

Spider webs everywhere. At one stage Bob's back was covered in them. As you can see, in Europe / Austria we do the work ourselves. It always seems easier to ask somebody else to do your work and once you start doing stuff yourself, you realize how hard the work was that you had asked others to do!

This is a photo from last year and oh, yet again Bob seems to be the only one working...but don't forget, someone has to now and then take a photo. Otherwise we worked together as a team. The entrance to the real pig sty is the striped door on the right of the picture.

This photo is more a reminder to myself that we have done a huge amount of work. Most of the building rubble, earth and wood lying about, has been dug up one shovel at a time by Bob & I.

" Bob, the two of us have done alright..."

Biggi