Gardening and Jackdaws

The front garden. The before photo. Yipes. Full of overgrown, leggy plants, really prickly brambles that have spread through everything and huge clumps of grass. The house has been sitting empty for eight months over the main growing season and things are rampant, we had to fight our way to the front door.
I've been busy clearing the garden for a few weeks; my poor  legs and shoulders, living in a third floor flat for several years has atrophied my gardening muscles.
The garden is now clear of brambles (wow their root systems are tenacious!) and I've started to replant. I've kept some red valerian, honeysuckle and pulmonaria and have added good old cottage garden favourites -lady's mantle, rosemary, lavender, honesty, perennial geraniums, heuchera and cotoneaster for it's evergreen-ness and berries for the birds. I'm enjoying this all so much, I realise now how much I've missed having a garden these past years.
Haven't seen much bird life at all apart from crows so I want to encourage the smaller birds into the garden, I miss the blue tits and robins we used to see all the time in Buckinghamshire. Perhaps they're not so common out here on the Somerset levels?
The jackdaws are fascinating though, they talk to each other all the time with a varied vocal repertoire, flying across the rooftops in a huge group then separating off into pairs, preening and cackling away. Note to self: Find a book about corvids.

Reading: Year One, Nora Roberts -early days, not sure I like it
Watching: Vikings/American Gods
Listening: Nick Drake -autumnal for some reason

New home, new start

Well, here we are in our new home in Somerset.
 Fairly traumatic moving in period as we discovered water leaks, unwanted furniture, cupboard doors hanging off and we had no idea how the boiler worked. Added to that the loo in the bathroom sounded like a foghorn when you flushed it and the downstairs loo didn't flush at all unless you took the cistern lid off and pulled the mechanism up from inside.
However we discovered that our next-door-but-one neighbour is a plumber/handyman who sorted out the boiler, water leaks and toilets in about an hour flat.
Now we've got pictures up on the walls and arranged our furniture the place is really beginning to feel like home. We've had the downstairs loo completely redone and I'm about to paint it this week. The roof and guttering is being sorted over the next few days and the garden is being re-fenced next week.
Our new home is a terraced stone cottage built in about 1840 with add-ons out the back to give it a big kitchen and two small rooms upstairs. The attic has also been converted to a big room which we are using for storage, guests and my yoga practice. The photo shows the kitchen and dining room from the kitchen window.