A Simple Life of Luxury

Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means

Category: Hobbies & Pastimes

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Hobbies & Pastimes / Play

A Little World on My Shelf: Building My First Book Nook

There’s something quietly magical about miniature worlds — little scenes frozen in time, tucked away on a shelf, inviting your imagination to step inside. This Christmas, Anna gave me the perfect excuse to dive into that magic with a thoughtful and rather brilliant gift: a ‘Book Nook’ model kit. I finally finished it today. For...

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Beekeeping / Gardening / Technology

Boundary Wires, Bees, and BST

After a busy couple of weeks with a trip to Fuerteventura and then a week at a conference with work, the spring garden was looking a little overwhelming. Things—namely the goosegrass, dandelions, and stinging nettles—were getting out of hand, and I’d yet to get Hector, our robot lawnmower, up and running. Robot Mowers Harriet, the...

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Beekeeping / Gardening

Spring has Sprung

What a lovely day today. Spring has finally sprung! The garden has another new shed as well, and there are lots of new gardening tools on the way. Hopefully, if I find the time, I’ll get the garden looking nice again. There’s certainly plenty of signs of life out there. The bees are busy, the...

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Gardening

Early Garden Chores

It seems as though the start of the garden chores gets earlier every year. It was the first day of February at the weekend, and I was out working in the garden before the sun was up. The first job was to finish off some edging around the new shed. The wooden edging wasn’t high...

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Beekeeping

Another Honey Harvest

Having harvested some honey a few weeks ago, the bees fought back and stopped us taking any more for a while. One of the hives had honey that, at the time, wasn’t fully sealed, another decided to sting us and prevent us getting any off. So, we left them for a few weeks and then...

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Beekeeping

Honey Hostilities

This weekend was all about the honey harvest! Anna collected the extractor on Friday afternoon and I’d already put clearer boards on a couple of our hives. The ‘Bedroom’ Hive was huge with 4 completely full supers and a fifth that was half full. ‘Dyfi’ hive had two full supers and ‘Leri’ had a couple...

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Hobbies & Pastimes

Pottery Classes

Our pottery classes are coming to an end so it’s been a little difficult to decide what to do next as there doesn’t seem to be much point starting new projects as we won’t have time to finish them – it takes weeks what with drying time, firing time, decorations, glazes and a second firing....

Pottery Decorating 0

Hobbies & Pastimes

Decorating Pottery

Most of our time was spent decorating some of our pottery creations whilst at out pottery ‘class’ this week. I’ve decided that Anna’s is better at this part of the process than I am!

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Gardening

Pond Update

Seeing as it’s now been just over a year since we decided (on somewhat of a whim) to create a pond in the garden, I thought I’d update you on its progress. It was always intended as a ‘wildlife’ pond. That’s an excuse for letting it go a bit wild, leaving it to do its...