Tuesday 19 January 2010

Inko...on your mat

Here's a short video showing Inko practising 'on your mat'. She's definitely making progress :)

(although when I tried to get a video of this at lunch time as soon as I got the camera out she picked the mat up and shook it instead of sitting on it! Unfortunately I didn't catch it on camera!)

Sunday 17 January 2010

Sorry for the silence!

I can't believe it was October when I last posted anything on here! It has all been a bit crazy recently with the renovation work, and we're not quite finished yet, but we're much closer to normality than we were!

The actual building work is now complete and three rooms have become one at the back of our house! It is a lovely space, and makes so much more sense as it is now than the clumsy layout it used to be. We have installed the new kitchen and we're really pleased with it. We have a bit of painting left to do in there, some coving to fit, handles to go on the cabinets and the new flooring to lay, but it is actually a fully functioning kitchen since the cooker went in last weekend, so no more cooking on the two ring portable electric hob! Not to knock that too much though, as it has served us very well for the last 3 months or so!!


We haven't started on the other end of the room yet, as you'll see from some of the video below which scans round the new room (sorry it's a bit blurry - it was taken on my phone), but we plan to get going with that fairly soon. We need to damp proof the floor and pay self-levelling flooring, and then we'll be laying laminate. It also needs painting, and some pipes need boxing in, but none of that should be too difficult hopefully. We haven't really worked out what to call that end yet. Ideally it would make a great dining room but as we don't have the money left to buy a nice dining table yet, at the moment we are just referring to that end as 'the bit' :)


Now that we're not so chaotic Inko is much more settled than she has been, as it is starting to feel like a home again, rather than a building site. She is still sleeping upstairs in one of the bedrooms as her den area is still full of stuff at the moment but we hope to be able to clear that in the next few weeks, as much of what is in there is destined to end up in 'the bit' once the flooring is down!





This is a rather wobbly and blurry video, but shows what the new kitchen looks like








Looking backwards from the new kitchen to 'the bit'



And again from a slightly different angle





One side of the kitchen, facing out to the garden





The other side of the kitchen, with our new cooker that we LOVE!



"Inko...arms"
Thought I'd better include an updated picture of Inko, seeing as we have been using her blog for house stuff for so long! This is Inko's favourite position, which she gets from her Dad, Keskiyo, having the underneath of her arms scratched. She likes to ask anyone to do this by hopping up onto her hind legs, and will sit there for ages loving the attention!
At the end of this month Inko has her first show of the year, an Open show in Reading. I just have to hope that we both remember what we are supposed to do in the ring - seems like ages since we last went to one! We're off to ring craft tomorrow night to get back into the swing of things.
I have also started doing some new training with Inko at home as I have been a bit lazy with it with all of the house stuff going on. I am trying to teach her to sit on a mat on command. The mat in the picture above is the one we're practising on. She seems to be picking it up very easily at the moment which is promising, but it still needs a bit of work yet. Hopefully it won't be long before I get it more consistently from her...and can start getting a response without the constant promise of a bit of sausage :)