Sometimes you have to create chaos to achieve calm

We frequently wonder if a Bulgarian couple had bought this house, whether they would have made nearly so much work for themselves. Our neighbours think we’re bonkers catching dormice and driving them a couple of miles down the road before releasing them (well perhaps we are a little). No-one can understand all the effort we’ve gone to to exterminate the ants – funny how there seems to be different rules about what creatures are acceptable to kill, perhaps if the ants had cute fury faces we’d feel different, either way, neither is particularly welcome. We have taken up 6 pieces of what would probably be deemed perfectly suitable linoleum in the living room and are intending to lay wooden floor boards – and to complicate matters further we want to put in some kind of damp course – totally unnecessary according to any Bulgarian we’ve asked – in fact we might even have to lie about why we want the polythene so that they will sell it to us! Anyway, here is a picture of our hallway the day we moved in, and also one of it now. While certainly the house looks more lived in, I am looking forward to eventually returning to some kind of happy, tidy medium.