We were back at one of our favourite place in Basingstoke this week!

The Dwelling Place is a amazing space providing secure longterm housing for 5 previously homeless people.

This was our second session there, the first session was a complete clear out of the back garden and with that and other work since the space has completely transformed into a blank slate.

Last nights session was the beginning of the rebuilding. We did a lot of carrying from tiles, wooden sleepers to half a tonne of sand. We finished this by laying out some of the sand in preparation for the tiles to go down.

All in all it was a good workout and very satisfying seeing everything that has transformed.

We had our third Walk Together session in conjunction with the Ramblers last night.

First, thank you to Tazmin for leading the session as I was struggling to move my neck and walk.

But it was great getting to the BSSC and chatting to Yazid who also got there early and then seeing Tazmin and Samantha and getting to catch up for a bit.

I'm jealous I missed the walk because it sounded great and the photos are beautiful! Also well led by Tazmin as you got a long way out through Crabtree

After a few months of hard work and great numbers we decided to do a social sessions this week!

As usual we met at the Basingstoke Sports & Social Club who have incredibly generously allowed us to use the their committee room for free all year. Then we went for a walk out and around the War Memorial Park before scurrying back once it started raining.

Once we were back at BSSC we went into the committee room and set up for our games night. Yeun & Tazmin both brought some board games to play and we decided to try some altered team games. We started with Articulate where to make it harder we combined it with charades, the highlight was definitely Yazid trying to make us guess "stream" which took at least 5 minutes.

We followed this with Scattergories where we decided to all work together to get the most possible words. I would like to formally admit that Charli was right and that a dormouse weighs significantly less than a pound.

Throughout all of this there were great conversations, snacks and a lot of laughs!

Thank you all for a great evening

No heatwave stops us, we were out in full force yesterday after a last minute change had us painting and gardening at the Viables Community centre.

It was a great session with the main job being to revitalise a lot of planters, scrapping the paint off and giving it a fresh lick. They turned out looking amazing and some wonderful before and afters!

Samantha & Kelly (t her first session did an exceptional job weeding the gardens around the area managing to fill a who bag with weeds before composting it.

Sammi and Peter also did a greta job litter picking where the highlight was finding a rats skull which was graciously donated to Charli who loved and left it.

With 6 of us meeting at the Basingstoke Sports and Social Club Evelyn &Tazmin walked to Viables while none of Sammi, Yeun or Peter were willing to let the others down so we jogged over.

Wow! I'm blown away by how much can be achieved in just over an hour! Led by Charlotte and Suzi from the Dwelling place we cleared so much of the garden space preparing it for the next step in its transformation.

This meant cutting down and removing a trees and bushes, completely clearing a tonne of ivy, moving all the rocks and pavement slabs and creating a giant pile of cleared out garden waste.

I'm incredibly proud of the team for how much effort they put in and how much we achieved and also thankful to the Dwelling Place for how welcoming they were.

For this session we met as usual at the Basingstoke Sports & Social Club before we split into 2 groups with Sammi, Yazid jogging and Tazmin, Yeun & Evelyn walked to the Dwelling place where Charli & Samantha met us.