Study

It's been a long while since I've blogged, but I have an excellent excuse. Michelle and I have moved house! North Ballaird was our dream home, the little smallholding in the country, but God has been calling us on to greater things. This includes me going back to University to study full-time to become a pastor. We are both very excited about this new phase in our lives, and selling North Ballaird was an enabling step which reduced the size of our budget considerably. We bought a three-bedroom semi detached in Dailly, a lovely little place with decent-sized rooms and high ceilings (built in the 40s) but in a terrible state. We have been sanding and skimming and painting and flooring and everthying else that might be needed to sort out a house, and ultimately have got it mostly done. We still need to  do the entrance, staircase and dining-room... and unfortunately we weren't able to get finished before we moved, so the dining-room furniture is packed into the lounge, and enormous piles of boxes are packed into the dining-room! Having moved from the farm, we have large quantities of generators, power tools, timber and other useful stuff from the outbuildings - and really nowhere to put it (the new place has no garage). So we've piled it in the dining room.

 But here's the plan: this morning I finished spraying the roof timbers with boron (to kill off the light woodworm infestation the surveyor picked up before it gets out of hand). This was an appalling job, and ended up taking about 10-12 hours to do (more if you include clearing the old fibreglass insulation, which was even worse) - thankfully there was only about an hour and a half left to do today. It's done properly, and the woodworms won't think much of the accommodation now. Next is to insulate at the roofline with spray-foam insulation; this will prevent the loft from getting damp, further cramping the style of the woodworm. I also have to strengthen the ceiling joists so that we can put loftboards down and shift all the dining-room piles into their long-term storage in the loft. While I'm up there I'll put some lights into the loft, and PIR-activated security spotlights for the front and back of the house. 

That will put us in a position to fix up the walls in the dining room, paint, lay laminate flooring, move the furniture in from the living room. That will give us room to breathe, but we'll still be against the clock to get the last bits done - as our baby is due on 24 September, and I'm starting at Scottish Baptist College on the 21st!

Exciting, frenetic times - but we know that God will see us through them!