Well last night I spent a hard earned £4.75 on Skyrim’s latest DLC – Hearthfire. Bought it at 8.30pm and was still up building houses at 1am this morning. Got up at 8am to continue building houses.
I began my new career as an architect in Falkreath, whereupon I encountered a courier who kindly gave me a letter asking if I wanted to adopt some children (silly boy – he obviously doesn’t know that the Dragonborn doesn’t bloody well have time for kids!) along with a letter from the steward of Falkreath advertising some land available to buy. So naturally, I toddled down to the Jarl’s Longhouse to speak with the old gent who robbed me of 5000 gold coins (a paltry sum and hardly left a dent in my Skyrim Current Account of 200,000 gold) and gave me a piece of paper telling me that a patch of grass next to a lake was officially mine. And he was lucky it WAS by a lake or I’d had have to kill him and get my 5000 back. It’s getting to where you can’t trust anyone these days.
All set out for me was a Drafter’s Table, Carpenter’s Bench, Anvil and a chest containing some bits and pieces of building materials. After I ran out of said materials, I spent a good hour or so looking for a quarry and some clay, only to irritatingly discover that both were neatly positioned about a foot away from my Drafter’s Table. Grr.
Continuing to build, I added an armory, storage room, main hall, entry way, double bedroom, upstairs bedroom, garden, cellar, animal shelter with a couple of chickens and a cow, bee keeping thingy, stable, horse and carriage and some lovely “glass of wine by the lake” type outdoor patio furniture.
But of course there was no way the Dragonborn was mucking out cows or cleaning all those windows, so naturally I had to hire a steward. Well after all the trouble she caused me, I tried to talk Serana the vampire into being my personal slave but she was having none of it, so I settled on my Whiterun Housecarl Lydia (I totally forgot I’d even bought Breezehome in Whiterun and when I got there, I found Lydia wandering around in the dark in an unfurnished house so when I asked her to come with me, I didn’t even have to prompt the question of being my new steward, she volunteered herself – must have been quite a step up from the one-roomed s**thole she came from).
After all this hard work (and I WAS worn out) I decided to give parenting a go and headed off to Honorhall Orphanage in Riften (where I’d previously taken out a dear old lady with an arrow to the head) to speak to some jumped up woman named Constance about relieving her of her understandable burden of children.
Rude Children
She was quite happy to give the kids away provided I had a suitable house for them (“suitable” meant one single bed with a child’s dresser – bless the little beggars, they probably thought all their Christmasses had come at once when they arrived at my huge manor and were given a not-to-be-sniffed-at 1000 gold allowance to go buy themselves some mudcrab meat with).
So far, the kids haven’t really done much, they certainly haven’t helped around the house despite being told to “do your chores” repeatedly. I’ll be having words with Constance about her disciplining methods. I’ve locked little Samuel and Runa Fair-Shield in the cellar until they learn some manners.
My daughter asked if she could keep a pet bunny so far and that’s about as good as it got.
Mine just told me there was something scary in the basement. I dunno what she was so worried about, I’d given her a wooden sword as a present and they were only skeevers. Wimp.