The New Shed

Easter Monday - 24th March 2008

Sarah Bowden — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:42:45 +0000

The beginning of the week starts with sewing. I’m making the covers for the foam cushions to go on the window seats… I get Guy sewing too. Seems only fair – it is his shed!

We also decide to put up the shelves on the eventually-acquired brackets. We have marked the floor where the uprights of the shed are, so we can screw straight into the wood. Easy peasy. We’ve bought (and cut and routed and stained) wide shelves so we can use the brackets the wide side out. Easy peasy. We fit all the brackets, making sure they are all vertical and horizontal with the spirit level. Then we put a shelf on. The bracket sticks out beyond the shelf. BUGGER. Obviously not as wide as we thought… we have to take all the brackets off and turn them round. And the holes don’t fit. BUGGER. Perhaps we shouldn’t do jobs requiring brains after we’ve been at work all day? Eventually we get sorted and the shelves look really nice. And don’t fall off the wall. We celebrate by putting two daleks on them.

Then we have the Really Good Idea of moving the little copper wall light and filling that space with a CD tower and bookshelves to Put Things On. We like making work for ourselves. So we buy wood and cut it to make two sides that will follow the slope of the roof, lots of little CD shelves, and 7 bookshelves. Then, having just got the shed looking nice, we cover the floor in plastic sheeting and start glueing, screwing and woodstaining everything.

We take a break on Friday and get ourselves clean to go to Erica’s wedding (our dormouse and bat friend). Lovely wedding, lovely venue in Somerset, and we’ve booked to stay overnight, but eventually don’t as the chap who’s buying Guy’s house is coming back to see it with his wife, who hasn’t seen it yet. Yes, we are still VERY excited! Luckily when we open the door she’s standing there with a huge grin saying ‘I love it already’ and we like her immediately. They also put a fake bed in their house to sell it… sounded even more wobbly than ours.

Then we get back down to the nitty gritty of DIY. We start by buying serious quantities of uprights, brackets and contiboard in order to put shelves in the back room.

And then they look so good we put shelves on the other side too… We have a lot of shelves. We also buy curtains (dark brown chocolate suede effect from B&Q – fab!)

Easter Sunday is not spent being clean and going out for lunch – it’s dawn to dusk DIY again. However, we do swap pressies. Guy gives me badger food, olives, a CD and a DVD about badgers, and I give him a Dr Who Tardis Easter egg (great sound effects) and two lovely Burberry cushions. Very chav, but had to be done, given the history of the floor. He is polite enough to say he likes them. I think I did better out of the pressie-swapping. Later on we watch two badgers tucking into the food we’ve put out, but after they’ve gone we discover they’ve eaten the dried fruit, peanuts and apple and COMPLETELY ignored the ‘badger food’. How ungrateful is that? It gets eaten later… perhaps the fox enjoyed it!

On Monday we erect the CD tower and shelves, finish off the shelving in the back room, do skirting boards, put up the curtain rail, move the copper light, saw legs off a table to make a coffee table (and it even ends up with legs the same length!), put up the curtains, put the internal door back on (having cut off the bottom to allow for the floor we’ve put in) and tidy up.

We think we’ve finished! Except the stove boys are coming back tomorrow to finish off the inside, paint the outside and repaint the flue.

We’re DONE! We can hardly believe it. It won’t really look furnished till Guy moves in – rug, chest of drawers, books, CDs etc. But in the meantime we are DONE on the DIY front. At least, we’re finished in the shed….
Now we start on the house!

Achieved: A fully furnished totally completed shed. We did it!
Hours worked: Sort of 8 all the days we weren’t working… and then curtain sewing after that.
Purchases:   Curtains, shelves (that’s a serious quantity of shelving – we have actually cleared out TWO B&Q stores), wood for carpentry.
Pressies: I got olives, badger food, DVD and CD. Guy got chav cushions and a noisy egg.
New skill of the week: I can at last keep a pencil behind my ear and not know it’s there. I’ve been trying to do this for YEARS. Am Very Excited.
Good news of the week:     We’ve FINISHED the shed!!
Wildlife update: Badgers don’t like badger food. Labradors say they do…
Plan for the week:   Start on the house…

Sunday 16th March 2008

Sarah Bowden — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:38:11 +0000

The beginning part of the week is weirdly filled with woodstain… shelves, floorboards for windowseat fronts, pew ends, window seat frames… To get the right amount of stain and varnish on things, I seem to be permanently staining something either before breakfast or after work. And my fingers end up a funny colour. On Monday I show three people in kagoules round Guy’s house and they irritate me. They ask millions of questions like when was it rewired and what are the floors made of and have the walls been replastered and was this once wallpapered. I begin to get facetious. ‘Is this wall hanging hiding damp?’ I lift it to show the perfectly blank wall and say ‘Nope’. ‘Is this fire ever used? It looks suspiciously new’. I fling open the doors, point inside and say ‘Ash’. Eventually they go. The youngest kagoule wearer phones the next day to say the house is ’15 miles too far east’. I refrain from pointing out ‘it’s in the same bloody place it was when you viewed it, love’.

On Friday I wake up unwell, get ready for work (as you do), drive to the office, my boss looks as me and says ‘yeugh, you look horrible, go home’, I’m feeling so unwell I’m not even offended, and I go back to bed. I sleep most of the day, wake up to see Guy and have my supper cooked for me, then go back to sleep again. As days go, it’s a bit of a write-off.

On Saturday we have viewings of Guy’s house booked for 11am and 1pm and Guy says he’s left the house tidy. I’m feeling better but a bit wiped out, so we get papers and go up there to wait. The first chap is just lovely – he’s driven 4 hours from Brighton after a friend saw the house in the paper and said it was what he wanted, and he’s super chatty… loves the house, thinks it’s perfect, takes photos and gets back in his car to drive the 4 hours back home. The second couple are not so much fun. They are, in a word, DULL. They stand in the middle of each room saying nothing. Nothing. Not ‘ooh, it’s nice’ or even ‘yuk I can’t stand it’. Just nothing. I give up, leaving poor Guy to try to jolly them along. Eventually (seems like they’re with us forever) they go. Hope they don’t come back. Then another lot come at 3, but they’re the complete opposite – superfast viewing, in and around in 20 minutes with a very bright kid (if you like that sort of thing) who tries to climb on the fake bed. I can see the horror in Guy’s face… luckily it doesn’t collapse. (The fake bed, not Guy’s face).

After all that non-shedding we’re in the mood for a bit of DIY, so we put in the frame for one of the window seats…

Add the front bits

And a seat with super cheap foam rubber and spare fabric..
Hey presto – one window seat!
Funny pictures – the walls are brown, not blue… Although the blue is nice. Maybe we should repaint?

On Sunday Guy’s mum Joy comes for lunch – I drive to Monmouth to pick her up, leaving Guy behind to get lunch ready. Damned Fine Plan. When we get back, my mum arrives to say hi, I go out to the shed to light the fire and then Guy comes in, all of a tizz. The first (chatty) viewer from yesterday has made an offer - £10k under the asking price. Close, but not close enough. We think about it, all have coffee sitting in the shed and then I phone him back to say ‘not close enough’. We leave it with him and start lunch… he phones again and agrees to come up to what we wanted. OHMIGOD! We’ve sold Guy’s house! On the market for precisely 9 days. CRIKEY! And he’s already sold, wants to move in at the end of April. OHMIGOD! That gives us about 7 weeks max to (a) finish the shed (b) clear Guy’s house (c) clear my house (d) do the renovations we wanted and (e) move Guy in. We celebrate with a bottle of wine (as you do) and then can’t think straight… OHMIGOD!

Guy drives Joy home (via his house to admire it in its clean and tidy state) and I take the cats and Blunkett for a walk in the woods. It’s a bit like ‘The Incredible Journey’ except that was two dogs and one cat and no humans. And probably one of the cats wasn’t muttering ‘does that bloody dog have to be here’ all the way. (BB). He loves her really…

Then we’re still twitchy, so we finish the other window seat… OHMIGOD!

Achieved:    We have two window seats and we’ve sold Guy’s house. Aaaaarrrrggggghhhh!
Hours worked:   More than we care to think about staining stuff, quite a few showing prospective buyers round Guy’s house, just a couple making window seats.
Purchases:   Nope, can’t think of anything. A cheap week…
Sales:   A HOUSE!
Wildlife update: The fox visited again this week – he is so beautiful. Izzy thought she would chase him, so she sat out on the patio whilst he was eating, wiggling her backside and looking ready to pounce. I don’t know why I was watching really… if she had pounced she might have come to a very sticky end.
Plan:   Help! What to do first? Finish shed? Start on house? Both? Eek!!!

Sunday 9th March 2008

Sarah Bowden — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:47:41 +0000

I have a day off on Tuesday to meet the energy assessor at Guy’s house to get the energy efficiency certificate bit of the HIP we need to sell the house. He turns up late, stays half the time he says he will, doesn’t look in the lofts and shoves off again. He says we’ll get a rubbish rating as its an old house but that it doesn’t matter as nobody ever reads the reports. I say that must be a shame for you and he launches into a lengthy lecture on just how successful he is and how busy he is. Odd chap. I go to B&Q to buy pots for planters and then head for IKEA to get the shelf supports that they didn’t have the last time we went. We had checked their ‘on-line stockcheck’ thing and it had said ‘in stock’. Which, as they did have one bracket, was technically correct, if useless. This time I am wiser. I phone IKEA and speak to A Real Person who says that yes, they are in stock and that there are 57 of them. Hooray! I drive down in great anticipation. Big mistake. When I arrive at IKEA there are blue polo-shirted Co-Workers (never call them ‘staff’) on the roundabout outside the car park waving people past. Er, why? Everyone, naturally, slows down to talk to them, and the co-workers look a little weary of speaking through car windows. I slow down to ask them what’s happening, and am told that there has been a fire and that the store is closed. Indefinitely. For the day. (Which, incidentally, are two different things… indefinitely being considerably longer than ‘for the day’, but never mind). The damned place is SHUT. BUGGER. There is nothing else to do, so I drive home via the cake decorating shop (blocks of black icing for tyres) and B&Q for a doormat which I didn’t get in B&Q earlier because I could get one in IKEA. Which I could have if it had been open… Back to Guy’s for planting the last few tubs and arranging the doormat, then back to mine to finish what I can on the electrics. And woodstain something or other…

Wednesday and Thursday are entirely taken up with cake making – it’s a limousine cake for an 8 year old’s birthday party, and it works fine.

On Friday we have both taken another day off for the stove boys to come back and finish the inside, paint the pipe outside, disguise the orange rubber bath mat and sort out the paint mess. The boss turns up, the lads don’t – he says they are ‘busy elsewhere’. He also says that if we’d wanted a black pipe we should have asked for a powder coated precoloured machine manufactured pipe in any one of 16 agreed European colours. If we’d bloody known we could have had a powder coated precoloured machine manufactured pipe in any one of 16 agreed European colours I expect we would have asked for it, but as it wasn’t mentioned, we didn’t. He doesn’t seem to have heard of the old adage ‘the customer is always right’ and basically blames us for making his boys paint it black when that’s not really their job. As we have watched them paint stove flues black in both our houses before now, we think this is A Bit Rich. He will bring his painting expert (that’s a stove fitter who used to be a decorator) back with him to sort it all out. In three weeks time. Hey ho.

After his visit we head to IKEA again. This time we’ve phoned them to find out whether (a) the shelf brackets are in stock, (b) in stock by how many and (c) whether the store is on fire or not. They now have 55 brackets (2 sold since Tuesday, there should be some left by the time we get there) and no, it’s not on fire. We head off hopefully. It’s open!! We have a celebratory cheap lunch in the canteen and then go and find our shelf brackets. We also buy curtain hooks and rings. It is a very dull big yellow shopping bag… Then we go to several fabric supermarkets to look at fabrics for the window seats and the curtains. We’re thinking ‘brown and funky’ and don’t find anything even remotely suitable. We do, however, buy an enormous sheet of bargain foam rubber to make the window seat pads. It’s too big and too thin, but it was a BARGAIN. If we cut it and stick it in layers it’ll be fine. Probably.

We get home to find the ‘FOR SALE’ sign for Guy’s house has arrived. It’s huge, and we get to colour in our phone number ourselves… Very clever design. One teensy snag, though. It says ‘PRIVATE LET’ not ‘PRIVATE SALE’. Oops. We phone them up and they say they’ll send a new one pronto, but it might take a week. We gloss over ‘LET’ – literally, using white gloss paint. Now it just says ‘PRIVATE’, but who cares? At least it shows people the house is for sale. Or for ‘Private’, whatever that might mean.

On Saturday a couple come to view Guy’s house – so we whiz round with the hoover and tidy stuff away into drawers – Guy will be finding stuff in odd places for WEEKS! They love the house, but have only just put theirs on the market, so are in no position to buy. Frustrating. We go home to start on the window seats, but the first job is wood cutting, and it is pouring with rain, so we wait. And we wait. And we wait.

It never really stops, so we stick bits of wood into the pew ends instead… We call it marquetry. A carpenter would probably call it ‘amateurish filling’. The weird soggy looking bit (which will be inside the window seat) is a test of woodstain to see if it looks right. We think it will be fine…

Sunday is better and after a visit to the farmer’s market and a coffee in a trendy café with Karen, we crack on with woodworking stuff.

We cut lots of bits of wood to size and glue them together to make the window seat frames, cut some maple tongue and groove to size for the seat fronts, cut MDF for the seat, er, seats, and sand down our ‘marquetry’ on the pew ends.

We also cut and rout the shelves which will go on the brackets we eventually bought.

Achieved: We’ve done lots of woody things and we made a nice limousine cake.
Hours worked: Not that many up until Saturday, then we felt like we were slacking, so we did lots on Sunday.
Purchases: Shelf brackets! 6 of them. We checked, re-checked and checked again that we had 6.
Companies not to employ: The cleaners we had to do Guy’s house. We’re still finding all the bits they didn’t do. Can’t name names, obviously, as that would be libellous, but think famous film by Stanley Kubrick involving a large citrus fruit going tick-tock…
Plan for the week: Window seat frames need screwing together, then putting in place, stain maple for seat fronts, stain pew ends for seat ends, stain shelves for, well, shelves. Do battle with large sheet of foam rubber to make seats.
Wildlife update: The squirrels are very bouncy - obviously Spring is in the air! And our favourite badger is called PaintPot because he has a white tip to his tail... and he truly LOVES apples.
Hope for the week: That the beech tree doesn't come down in the promised storms and turn the shed into matchsticks.
Guy’s house sale progress: We’ve had an encouraging amount of enquiries, and one viewing already, with another one booked for Monday. Keep your fingers crossed!

Monday 3rd March 2008

Sarah Bowden — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:57:52 +0000

The week starts well with the builders merchants delivering lots of bits of wood for the architrave and skirting while we’re at work. We get home and start measuring. We measure how long the architrave needs to be, add on the width of the architrave, measure, cut and put in place. How easy is that? Except when we put it in place it is two feet too long. TWO FEET!!! Obviously something has gone wrong in the measuring/adding up bit. We decide we’ll just plonk the wood in place and mark it with a pencil, and then try and figure out the angles. Luckily we do have a mitre saw otherwise it would be never-ending. Finally we get the hang of it, and soon we’ve got the door pieces cut to fit. Then we start on the windows, and I cut the mitres totally the wrong way, so in the end we don’t have enough wood. Bugger. Never mind, most of it’s done! We label all the bits on the back (LL for Left window, Left side, RB for Right window, Bottom, etc) and we label one bit of skirting BF (Back Fridge). We know what we mean. Because we were so crap at measuring and cutting, we don’t get it all finished, and do the last few bits on Tuesday.

Then we lay everything on the floor and paint or stain it – the back room is going to have woodwash, and the front room woodstain.

On Wednesday we do more woodstaining, and decide that it would be sensible not to try and fit them in place till Friday, when we have a day off.

And it’s easy! We glue and pin everything, and soon our windows look like proper windows. Hooray!

On Saturday Wyn the Wire and Mrs Wyn arrive to do more electrics… Wyn shows me how to wire a socket, and I wire sockets. Guy is doing the outside catenary wire – a wire stretching from the apex of the new cabin to the apex of the pool cabin from which we will hang the cable, taking power from the pool cabin to the new cabin. Wyn does the fixing at each end, and I wire a light switch. There is far more to do than we had envisaged, but we do get the sockets working by the end of the day. We have POWER! And light! (If we plug a light in to a socket). HOORAY! The lights and heaters will be connected another day…

On Sunday we have a total day non-shedding. Which means we are at Guy’s house tarting it up – it goes on the market this week and we are, naturally, expecting a flood of viewings next weekend. We paint the newly plastered wall, pressure clean the slabs outside, make wigwams for the veggie garden, paint the wall again, throw unwanted bits and pieces into a bin liner, shove wanted bits into my car and rebuild the fake bed in the spare bedroom. Phew.

On Monday we have another day off work (this could be habit forming) and the stove is installed in the shed! It’s almost snowing, and it is VERY cold, so the stove is arriving just in time to keep us nice and toasty while we’re working in there… The flue was originally going to go up a bit, then right a bit, then up through the ceiling, but the boys decide it would be better if it just went straight up. One of them keeps looking worried – he’s in charge, and he doesn’t seem very confident.

The scary bit is when they cut a large hole in the roof.

The even scarier bit is when we see how they’ve finished off the outside – it is HIDEOUS. It’s been a long few days and maybe we’re a bit emotional, but we’re not particularly happy. Aside from the fact that it’s rubber and orange, they’ve left the bloody labels on the flue. Mmm, nice.

And the mess inside is horrendous. After they’ve gone I decide I can’t face it, then decide I have to face it, and it takes a good half an hour to clean up properly. At which point we notice that in spraying the flue black, they’ve managed to spray the wooden wall and the paintwork. A lot. We are even less happy.

In order to take a nice picture for Guy’s mum (who has kindly bought us the stove) we put a log basket next to it and light the fire. Then we sit in front of it with cushions and the dog and drink rather a lot of wine… We have a table lamp (on the Workmate) and the radio on – it’s almost like a real room. Although if we look behind us there are still electrical bits and dust sheets everywhere…

The boys will have to come back – the inside of the roof isn’t finished yet either. Hey ho.

Achieved: We’ve got working sockets! And a STOVE! WOO HOO!!
Work created: We’ll have to sand the wooden wall to get the black spray paint off and try to woodwash it again to match the rest of it. And repaint bits of the side wall too. Bummer.
Hours worked: All of them over the weekend. And Friday and Monday, which have been our days off. Other people get up late and go for a day’s shopping…
Purchases: Wood, wood and more wood. That’s a lot of wood.
Pressies: Guy’s mum hugely generously bought us the stove. THANK YOU!
Health update: For some reason I have given up sleeping. I sleep from about 11 – 1.30 then I’m awake through the night. I am SHATTERED! Guy is also knackered, but simply from doing so much DIY…
Plan for the week: Do less! And sell Guy’s house. And make a limousine cake.

Sunday 24th February 2008

Sarah Bowden — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:36:11 +0000

On Monday we varnish the floor again. And we have our first badger squabble – by the time we’ve hurtled out of the comfy sofa where we’re sitting after varnishing, they’ve been spooked (probably by us hurtling to the window) and gone… but definitely two badgers squabbling. Later in the evening one returns, looking a bit dishevelled… and he doesn’t like apples. Fussy bugger.

On Tuesday we varnish again – that’s 3 coats, and they’re still just soaking in. I say I’ll do one more Wednesday morning before work, then we can paint the walls in the evening. It’s still soaking in, so we buy more varnish, and do another coat instead of painting. And then I do another coat before work on Thursday. We think it’s 7 coats in all, and it looks lovely. Eventually. Then we cover it all up again to do the painting…

The colour is called ‘Cookie Dough’ and it is exactly like the same colour as our chocolate cake mixture. The paint is fab – great colour. In fact, Guy likes it so much he already has a sweatshirt to match…

I also go to the electrical supplies place to get the bits Wyn will need for connecting the power up – it will be BLISS when we don’t have to go to the pool cabin first to connect the power and lights. And it will also mean we can shut the window that the cables are currently passed through.

At the weekend there isn’t much else we can do, so we decide we have to tackle the a small bit of plastering at Guy’s house… rain has been getting in down the chimney and although we’ve cured it getting in, it’s messed up a bit of the bedroom plaster… easiest thing to do is batten it, put up more plasterboard and replaster.

We have battens and all the tools we need. At my house. We pile everything into mum’s car (bigger than mine!) and go to the builders merchants for plasterboard. That gets shoved into the car too, and we’re set.

We measure up the battens and mark them up for drilling, then realise we haven’t got enough. We’ll have to go and buy some more. We have tools and stuff at Guy’s house, but no money between us… We’ll have to go back to my house to get money to go to B&Q to buy battens. Which will take time. BUGGER. Then we remember Guy’s 20p piggy bank… so we raid that. I nip off to B&Q and pay for the battens with 20p pieces and Guy stays behind to drill holes into the wall. I get back to find him Very Cross and with a Very Blunt drill bit. Now we need to go back to B&Q for new drill bits… but we decide there won’t be enough 20p pieces, so we really do have to go via my house to collect money, then to B&Q for drill bits, then back to Guys. Then we decide that we have to drill into mortar (which we don’t know where to find) so we make random holes in the battens hoping to hit lucky. Eventually we have enough fixings in the battens, and wood that looks like Gruyere cheese…
We whack up two bits of plasterboard and then decide we have to go and get clean to go to Bob and Veronica’s party. However, we never do things that simply, so we’re going via IKEA to buy six black iron shelf supports for Guy’s shelves in the cabin. Easy. It shuts at 8, so we aim to get there for 7.30… we leave late, after having the world’s fastest baths, and hurtle into IKEA with a little time to go… we ignore everything in our bid to get to ‘storage’ and find the shelf displays. They have precisely ONE shelf bracket. Which is Not Much Good. Not even if you only wanted to put up one shelf… Even if we unscrew the display one on the wall, we’d still only have two. BUGGER. We are Not Happy. We leave in disgust and head for the party.

Good party! We have two cakes with us – a Malteser cake for eating, and a fruit cake for Bob and Veronica to take home for themselves… We think we’ve captured them in icing, and it gets much admired, which improves our mood no end. Guy’s band plays for some of the party, and it’s a good night all round…

On Sunday we finish the plasterboarding and then plaster the wall. Knowing how much mess we made in the cabin, we’re hugely careful not to splat plaster on the other walls and the carpet. And even we stay remarkably clean! We’re improving! My plastering’s not perfect, but it’s acceptable, and we think we’ll put a picture on the wall to hide the worst lumps. It’ll be a BIG picture…

After lunch we put a second coat of lovely chocolatey paint on the cabin walls, and that’s it. We stop. We are knackered. Again… We wonder what other people do on Sundays, and think it’s probably ‘lie in, breakfast, papers, coffee, walk, Sunday lunch, snooze, tea, telly, bath, telly’. We’ll do it one day…

Achieved: We have a painted shed!
Non-purchases: Those bloody IKEA shelf supports.
Pressies: Two fake sheepskin rugs to go in Blunkett’s NEW wicker dog baskets. The cats already think they’re lovely.
Wildlife update: Badgers, robins, squirrels, damn mole, pigeons… some days it’s like a Disney cartoon.
Plan for the week: Wood for architrave and skirting gets delivered Monday, then we cut it and paint it. Then fit it. We have Friday off work this week, so should make good inroads into the ‘finishing’ bits and pieces before the installation of The Stove on Monday 3rd March. Hooray!
Statue of the week: Saturday saw the unveiling by Anthony Hopkins of the statue of Tommy Cooper in Caerphilly. After the party on Saturday night we went to have a look at it on our way home. It’s good! Apart from the odd mouth, the strange unrecognisable stance and the rabbit with its tongue sticking out…

Sunday 17th February 2008

Sarah Bowden — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:52:35 +0000

The early part of the week is rather full of cakes… There’s a Horrid Henry cake for a little girl, and we start work on a 60th cake for two friends. However, Tuesday night is enlivened by watching a badger in the garden… we have learnt that they like apples, so I roughly chop an apple up and put it out with the peanuts, dried fruit and Madeira cake remains (yes, I know, sounds like a fab meal for a human). Very soon a badger appears and, as the utility room door isn’t shut properly, I open it a fraction and listen to him eating. Fantastic chomping and slurping noises! I push the door open further as he seems unconcerned and before long I’m standing in an open doorway watching a badger thoroughly enjoying his dinner only ten feet away. Amazing!

I have a good plan for Valentine’s Day. It goes something like this:

1. Get home very early (before Guy comes round) and wrap presents.
2. See Tree Surgeon (coming at 4.30) with Guy.
3. Guy goes home to get dog, or walks dog.
4. I put roses, champagne and pressies in the shed and light a candle or two. It will be romantic.
5. Guy returns, lovely evening in the cosy shed, nice surprise.

What actually happens is this:

1. It’s bloody freezing.
2. Guy gets home before I do.
3. The tree surgeon fails to turn up.
4. I don’t wrap very much.
5. We stay indoors.
6. I drink all the champagne that I’ve given to Guy.

On Friday I pick up the floor nailer (again) – apparently the piston broke on the last one. I say we were a little pistoned off… I also collect the big floor sander and a little whizzy one for the edges. In the evening there are TWO badgers feeding together…

On Saturday we have to take up all the floorboards we’ve laid down and nail them in place. Luckily they fit back pretty much the same, so there’s only minimal cutting and adjusting. This time the nailer does its stuff, and Guy does the nailing while I re-arrange floorboards.

It’s amazingly quick and it only takes us an hour to do half the front room floor. Hooray! By lunchtime we’ve done all the front room and over half the storage area. In the afternoon we whiz off to the local parish hall to see the plans for its refurbishment. We don’t change, and are by far the muckiest people there. Still, they seem pleased to see us, whatever state we’re in. They should have seen us when we were plastering… We go back and finish nailing the floors, then decide to fill all the holes. We saved sawdust from last week, so now we mix it with glue until it is the consistency of trout pate then push it into the holes. Lots of holes, and not just where we’ve had to screw… where machinery was once pinned? Who knows… Once we’ve finished with that, Guy goes off to a gig and I do cake stuff.

On Sunday we start sanding.

Guy does the big butch stuff…

and I do the little whizzy edge thing.

Both jobs are knackering on our backs… We have face masks and ear defenders. Although I think I got the short straw there… My ear defenders are attached to the chain saw helmet, so I have to wear the helmet too. Still, as I keep whacking my head on the wall, it is actually A Jolly Good Idea.

We rough sand it all across the grain which takes all the old varnish off,

then rough sand it with the grain, then medium sand it, then fine sand it… it takes all day. We sweep between the sandings, do a final sweep and then hoover the whole floor. Then we put a coat of varnish on it. The floor is a really pretty, well, maple colour. Probably just as well as it’s maple.

Progress. The floor is nailed down, sanded and varnished once. And it is STUNNING!
Hours worked: Sort of 9-5 and then 9-6 at the weekend. We ache.
Pressies:  I gave Guy a wicker dog basket for Valentine’s day (can’t count the champagne as I drank it) and he gave me two CDs and a book called ‘Far From The Sodding Crowd’ which is the follow up to ‘Bollocks To Alton Towers’ which found us the brilliant Lawnmower Museum. We’re off to Devon for a few days in March, and I’m already keen to visit the Paperweight Museum…
Purchases:     Floor Vanish, face masks and a BIG brush.
Plan:      Paint the walls, try to get Wyn the Wire back to hook up lights and electrics.
Drink:    After all that champagne on Valentine’s night I have cut out drink completely. Until today. Well, the floor needed celebrating…
The ‘oh bugger’ moment of the week. The hire shop didn’t give us the right bag for the small sander to collect the dust. We tried it without (too messy) so had to bodge a bag together using our best Blue Peter techniques with string, brute force and duct tape. Well, if it’s good enough for Apollo 13…
Tip of the week: Wear a crash helmet for edge sanding. Damned Fine Thing.
Compliment of the week: Sheelagh (used to be in Guy’s office) visited to pick up a cake and admired our handiwork. She said ‘you’ve obviously had someone in to do it’ and was hugely impressed that we hadn’t.
Insult of the week: Derek the Dab called round on Sunday afternoon with a trout for me, and to see progress. He admired the floorboards and I said proudly ‘what about our plastering?’. He had a look and said ‘yes, well, it’s a shed’. I’m not really insulted. Much.
Wildlife update 1: On Saturday there were THREE badgers feeding together – really exciting!
Wildlife update 2: The robins aren’t really being ignored – we’re just terribly excited about the badgers. Anyway, robins are supposed to be hugely territorial, but we often have three in the feeding area of the garden all at once…

(Note the shed in the background…)

Sunday 10th February 2008

Sarah Bowden — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:27:18 +0000

On Monday night we do cake stuff, on the basis that the plaster is still drying out in the front room so we can’t mist coat it yet… we have a fairytale castle cake to do for Friday, so we prepare the turrets. Very pretty. Very unshedlike.

By Tuesday the plaster is beautifully dry – and even looks smooth! We mist coat the whole of the front room, as I have a day off on Wednesday and can paint the ceiling – Dave the Tree Surgeon is coming to chat with us about the beech. Except by Tuesday evening he no longer is coming, having cancelled. I’ll have my day off anyway!

So on Wednesday I have a lie in till, ooh, at least 7.30 and then spend a gentle day painting… first the ceiling in the front room, then all of the back room. Then mum comes round so I have a break, then I re-do the front room ceiling, then the back room again. The storage area is white (white was cheaper than ‘Magnolia’) and by the time I stop I have something akin to snow blindness and can’t see if I’ve missed any bits. I then chip all the plaster off the floor, sweep up and hoover so that we’re ready for flooring at the weekend.

Guy comes round after work and makes suitably admiring noises, then we finish the fairytale castle cake. It has turrets filled with sweeties, and white chocolate buttons, and lots of icing and flowers and stuff. Bit of a sugar-fest really…

Thursday night sees us back out in the shed woodwashing the stud wall. We’re not sure about the colour – it’s a pale green and it looked good when we tested it on a postcard. We press on and when we stop and stand back, we like it! Which is probably just as well really.

Before the weekend I go to the hire shop and hire a floor nailer and a bow wrench (in case any of the boards are warped). I get instructions in how to use the nailer (dead easy) and lots of supplies of nails. It looks fantastic! And you get to thump it with a big mallet… excellent for working out any frustrations! We’ve had battens and polystyrene for the floor delivered, so now we’re ready to get started. I’ve measured each piece of flooring and written the length on the back, which should speed things up and minimise the waste. We feel Very Organised.

The weekend is bright and clear – very springlike, hooray! We start with the battens, drilling them into the concrete, placing the weirdly spotty polystyrene between them and filling in the gaps with bits round the edges… Guy does all the drilling, which is incredibly noisy, so he wears ear defenders. Or it could be that I keep wittering on and he just wants some peace! Then we start on the floor. We lay all the maple lengths out on a tarpaulin outside (thank goodness it’s dry) and pick the ones closest in size to what we want and trim them…

We can’t use the nailer for the first couple of pieces, so we drill recessed holes in the planks and screw them – we’ll fill over the screws later. By row 3 we can get the nailer going, and Guy is a whiz…I help with the lining up, he whacks it and it shoots a nail into the tongue at exactly the right angle. Brilliant piece of kit!

In no time we’re getting a nice rhythm and we’ve done about 7 rows. Then BANG. Something goes wrong with the nailer and it jams. We manage to unstick the jammed nails, but it just won’t work… We try phoning the hire place but it’s Saturday afternoon and they’ve all gone home. We try shaking it, swearing at it and yelling, but nothing helps, although we do feel better for it.

We decide all we can do is carry on with the cutting and fitting, and take the jammed nailer back to the hire place on Monday and get another one (and instructions on how to un-jam it) for next weekend… HUGELY frustrating. And of course the trouble is that if the floor isn’t fixed tight, it’s difficult to cut pieces for round the door edges… We decide the only thing to do is bung more screws through the occasional floorboard to hold the whole thing in place. We’ll take them out eventually and fill the holes when the planks have been nailed… We plod on and make it to nearly half way across the front room when we’re too tired to do any more - then we have to move all the lengths from the tarpaulin into the shed or back into the pool cabin overnight. In the dark we walk up to see Derek the Dab in case he can magically unjam the nailer, but he has no ideas either. We all agree that the whole thing needs to be dismantled, but also agree that if we can’t put it back together again, taking it back to the hire shop in bits in a cardboard box probably wouldn’t be popular… We’ll just have to do what we can without it.

On Sunday morning, after a quick dash to the farmer’s market, we carry on cutting and bung a couple more screws in for good measure. We cut bits for round the doors, and even chisel something off the underneath for the planks that meet the internal door. Blimey, this is almost carpentry!

The back room is easier – the planks are either 43” or 23” and we can alternate them to avoid joins being together. Except the battens are slightly warped so the lengths vary - Guy calls out ‘fat 23 with tongue’ or ‘not quite 44 with groove’ and I cut the right piece. It feels like we’re yelling out MacDonalds orders…

And we finish it! Well, ok, it’s not nailed. We haven’t fitted the back room as tightly, so we’ve cut a few spares and also not cut in around the door yet. We have a pile of unusable planks, remarkably few offcuts, and still a large pile of unused lengths. It looks fab, and will look even better when it’s sanded. And nailed.

Achieved: We’ve FINISHED THE FLOOR! Well, ok, not quite, but that was down to the lack of a working nailer, not us. Although it was dark when we stopped, so we probably wouldn’t have got it all nailed anyway…
Purchases: Battens and spotty polystyrene.
Pressies: Mum bought me a meerkat keyring for the new shed key. She said it reminder her of me. That means I have a long neck, stand up straight and look inquisitive. Could be worse…
Wildlife update: The mole has given up making mounds under the birdseed feeder. He’s started on the lawn.
Plan for the week: We can sand the ceiling beam, admire the flooring and do more work on the pew ends. And we have three cakes to do…
Injury of the week: Countless cuts and notches out of my fingers. I’m not quite sure how, although I suspect the new and very sharp vegetable knives are partly to blame.
How to treat your mother. On Wednesday when mum came to see how I was getting on with the painting, I was about to take stuff to the dump anyway, so she came along for the ride. Other people take their mothers out for coffee – I take mine to the dump. She seemed to enjoy it though…
Amazing foresight of the week. We know we have holes to fill in the floorboards. So we saved sawdust from the cutting to mix with wood glue and make filler that will match the maple. Forward thinking or what?!

Sunday 3rd February 2008

Sarah Bowden — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:47:37 +0000

On Monday, somewhat unexpectedly since he’d said ‘Thursday’, Derek the Dab turns up and finishes the front room plasterboarding. And, even better, he supplies free plasterboard - bargain! We don’t ask any questions… He’s now finished, so we can crack on with the plastering at the weekend – too strenuous a job for an evening after work!
On Tuesday we Nitromors the pews again. We’re getting there, and there’s still no actual scrubbing or manual labour involved – we dab the stuff on, wait 20 minutes and gently lift it off. MUCH better than floorboards.
On Wednesday and Thursday we switch from DIY to cakes and complete a cake for Sheelagh’s daughter’s 40th – she’s into ballroom dancing, so we call this one ‘Strictly Cake’.

At the weekend, we plaster. The plan is to do both the ceilings (yes, before the walls, told you we’d learnt) on Saturday, then the other three walls on Sunday. We’ve sussed out the best method – we mix the plaster, then I shin up the trestles and Guy keeps me supplied with plaster while I slap it on the ceiling. Then I polish it off, and Guy cleans up all the tools. By teatime on Saturday we’ve got both ceiling sections finished, and they’re better than the back. Which was, on a second look, Pretty Damned Rough. Never mind, it’s a storage area.

We go to B&Q for odd bits that we need, then we put a coat of woodwash on the front of the door that will be in the stud wall when it’s finished… Nice easy job!

On Sunday we do the front wall, then one side wall, then the other. All before lunch. OK, it was a late lunch! ‘WE’VE FINISHED THE PLASTERING WOO HOO!’. It was a massive job to do, something we’ve never done before, and it looks ok. Ish. If you don’t look too closely. Guy says that if anyone points out any flaws in the finish we’ll just lock them in the back room for a few days… And, judging by the state of us, we haven’t got the hang of staying clean!

After our late lunch we clear up and then, by way of light relief, we mist coat the back room. Messy again! When will we get to a job that doesn’t involve mess??!

After the mist coat on the ceiling we don’t do a lot else – our muscles have given up and we’re A Bit Tired. For a bit of light relief, Guy has a haircut. We have a set of clippers, and I can now do his hair in five minutes flat. And it usually involves a splendidly silly ‘hairdresser’ type conversation…
‘Did you do anything nice this weekend, sir?’
‘Took the wife to B&Q.’
‘Ooh, that’s nice, sir, buy anything nice?’
‘Bought her some paint.’
‘Are you decorating a room for her, sir?’
‘No, she’ll paint it herself.’
All of which, frankly, makes me sound A Bit Butch. Guy goes home and I have a girly bath with lots of bubbles then get into my pink dressing gown just to prove I can do girly stuff.

Achieved: We’ve FINISHED THE PLASTERING WOO HOO! Yes, we are still excited…
Hours worked: Too many to count at the weekend. Our aching muscles tell us it was too many. However, it was worth it because we’ve FINISHED THE PLASTERING WOO HOO!
Purchases: Scrim tape, paint, rollers, sandpaper. Yep, exciting stuff.
Pressies: Serious lack of gin this week. Perhaps me staring dolefully at the empty bottle will have done the trick?
Tip of the week: Set unrealistic targets and then stick to them. Yes, you’ll be knackered by the end, but it moves the job on very nicely…
Wildlife update: Badger No 1 is back each night, and seems to be coming earlier to get to the food before the fox, the mouse is still shredding polystyrene in the outside loo, and the mole is back. BB has spent the week curled up on a spare duvet. Useless cat.
Plan for the week: Paint out the storage area (two coats), mist coat the front room, paint the ceiling (twice), Nitromors the pews, put door furniture back on internal door, make a fairy tale castle cake (remembering not to use Nitromors on it), start with the flooring.
Injury of the week: I have ‘Plasterer’s Blister’ on my right hand! Perhaps we did too much? But look on the bright side – WE’VE FINISHED THE PLASTERING WOO HOO!

Sunday 27th January 2008

Sarah Bowden — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:06:53 +0000

The beginning of the week is very dull, shedwise. We’re really stuck until Derek the Dab can come and put up the plasterboard. We decorate a fruit cake and take delivery of the pale green woodwash for the stud wall – nice colour! We paint little samples of our ‘cookie dough’ and ‘ivory’ onto postcards and try them all together. Lovely. Paint sorted.

On Wednesday Derek phones to say that he can start doing the boards and have I got them yet. I haven’t. He says that B&Q are doing boards for £4.95 so he’ll get them from there unless Travis Perkins (where I now proudly have a trade card) can do them cheaper. I phone TP and, after a bit of haggling, I get them down to £4.94. Well, every penny and all that…

There is then what can only be described as a teensy breakdown in communications. Having said to Derek that TP won’t be able to deliver and he’ll have to pick them up and I’ll let him know where, I presume that my text saying ‘ordered and paid for at TP’ will let him know where he’s getting them from. He, on the other hand, takes ‘ordered’ to mean ‘ordered to be delivered’ and doesn’t pick them up. When he arrives he says ‘where are the boards, then?’ and I say ‘ha ha funny joke you’ve got them’ and he says ‘ha ha funny joke no I haven’t.’ We quickly establish that neither of us has the boards, so he fits the one fire board Jim the Stove delivered last week, and goes home again. I ask about his tattoo and he strips off to the waist to show me - we both agree this is the moment when Guy will turn up and find me in the shed with a half naked man…

On Thursday it works a whole lot better, and I get a phone call mid afternoon to say that he’s doing well but he’s run out of boards and can I pay for some more which he will go and collect. Excellent. Another teensy problem at this point – I’ve lost my voice. It’s been gone all day, and I can really only whisper. Derek has managed to hear me (just) but phoning the builder’s merchants might be a whole different ball game. I give it a go. ‘Hello’ I whisper, ‘It’s Mrs Bowden, can you hear me?’ I can hear a lot of ‘shushing’ and the radio being turned off in the background and then Les (he tells me he’s Les, and he’s a big bear of a bloke) says in a whisper ‘Try again’. I whisper again who I am, and that I want some more boards. ‘No problem’ he whispers back… and I place my order and give him my credit card details. ‘Sorry about the voice’ I say at the end. ‘No problem, take care’ he whispers back. By far the gentlest phone transaction ever completed!

By the time Guy and I get home the back room is nearly finished, so we make coffee and stand around making admiring noises while Derek does all the work. The weather has turned, and it’s cold, so Guy and I are in hats, gloves and coats while Derek is busy taking layers off as he’s getting warm from working so hard. He is so fast it’s funny. We watch and try to work out just how long it would have taken us to do…

The plan is for us to do the plastering, so I hit the internet for some tips. The first dozen or so sites I look at advise ‘it’s difficult, get a professional in’. Big help. Derek lends us a hawk (board thing to put the plaster on) and a float (trowel for putting it on the wall) and we buy ourselves another set so that we can both plaster. Skim. Whatever it’s called. And we buy plaster.

We make a start. We mix half a bag of plaster in a big bucket with the whisk attachment to the power drill (fab toy). We are working inside and it whisks itself onto Guy, me and every available wall. Maybe outside next time? We tip it out onto a board. Not all of it comes out, so we hit the bucket. All the dry unmixed stuff falls on top of the mixed stuff. We put it all back in the bucket and mix it again… This time it works, and we’re away. We start on the two small walls in the storage area to practice because they don’t involve ladders or trestles. I’m quicker, and Guy swears more. We both drop a lot on the floor, which we then stand in and spread around. I put mine on thinner, Guy’s is thicker. We have a look at both walls and decide somewhere between the two is good. We wait five minutes and then ‘smooth’ the plaster. A professional plasterer would then flick water on it, do it again, and then go over it twice more. We decide after our first ‘smooth’ that it looks pretty damned fine and that it is, after all, a storage area.

Mum comes to see how we’re getting on, and makes us coffee. She is amused by the state of us (pretty much covered in plaster) and says that if Guy’s hands weren’t so clean she’d have A Damned Good Idea where they’d been… Next we do the ceiling. It is at this point that we discover we should have done the ceiling first, as now we’re dropping wet plaster on the already plastered walls. Bummer. We persevere… I’m up on the trestles slapping it on the ceiling, and Guy is keeping me supplied with plaster on the hawk things. It’s not as bad to do as we’d suspected and we do our ‘one smooth’ routine again – and we’re done! After lunch we tackle the big back wall, but run out of mixed plaster near the bottom – Guy quickly mixes up more and we discover just how wet ‘too wet’ is. On the plus side, having it very runny does mean that you can actually pour it onto the trowel… Or, at least, you can if you haven’t already let it all slide off the hawk onto the floor. We are KNACKERED by the time we finish – I have a long hot bath and spend half an hour picking plaster off my trackie bottoms, and Guy goes off to a gig…

On Sunday we do the remaining wall in the storage area. We cleverly mix the plaster thicker this time, and quickly discover just how stiff ‘too stiff’ is. We can barely spread it on the wall, and it’s really hard work. It looks like it’s never going to be smooth. I do the first ‘smooth’ and it’s still a disaster. I stand on the trestle and flick water all over it (and all over Guy who is now at the bottom of the wall) and we smooth again… it works! We also find that a paintbrush makes the joint between the walls smooth… Hooray! By the time we plaster the front room we might actually have a vague idea of what we’re meant to be doing…

We tidy up (takes AGES) and take a trip to the dump with the offcut plasterboard (lots) and dead lumps of plaster (lots). Then we fix up the outside light, move one socket in the front room to make plastering easier, woodwash the back of the internal door, add more gravel to the path, burn rubbish, and sand down four internal doors that have been sticking in the utility room. Normal Sunday, really…

Achieved: We’ve plastered the back room! And ourselves. And the floor.
Hours worked: Lots plastering. And all the other bits we did on Sunday.
Purchases: Plasterboard, plaster, plasterboard again, more plasterboard, hawk, trowel, gin.
Pressies: Friday was Santes Dwynwen day – the Welsh equivalent of Valentine’s Day. Guy bought me beautiful red roses. I bought him mushrooms. In my defence, I had left my purse at home and we needed mushrooms, so with the few coins I found in the bottom of my bag I chose ‘dinner’ over ‘romance’. Yes, I know, rubbish excuse.
Tip of the week: Plaster the ceiling first. Thank you, we know now.
Wildlife update: There seems to be a mouse in the outside loo. We know this because he’s chewing the polystyrene insulation so it looks like it’s snowing in there… Bet it’s cosy though!
Plan for the week: Paint the other side of the internal door (now off its hinges and in the pool cabin), strip the pew ends, Derek will come back to finish the plasterboarding, plaster the front room next weekend. Start with the ceiling.
Lack of communication of the week – Part 1. That has to be Derek and the non picking-up of the plasterboard. It’s sorted for this week – I said to PICK IT UP PLEASE. That should do it.
Lack of communication of the week – Part 2. My voice going. It is now back, thank you. Guy said he quite liked the peace…
Lack of communication of the week – Part 3. On Saturday Izzy was very vocal at lunchtime, and we thought that, Lassie-like, she was trying to tell us something. We couldn’t figure out what, so we gave her lunch instead. What she was trying to say was that I had locked BB in my car and he was stuck. I found him about 9 at night… he was a bit peeved.
Lack of communication of the week – Part 4. Derek told us what plaster to buy – ‘Fissell Multi Finish’. Don’t some of these companies have silly names? When we got it we couldn’t help laughing… It’s ‘Thistle Multi Finish.’
Good news of the week: It stopped raining! There are snowdrops, primroses and a daffodil in the garden - makes you think Spring might be just around the corner!

Sunday 20th January 2008

Sarah Bowden — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 18:05:48 +0000

On Monday it rains and we do polystyrene. We take out all the corner sections that we have already done, add battens to attach the plasterboard to, recut the polystyrene and then stuff it back in the wall. We also put up a board in the storage area to take the pendant light that will eventually be in there. Not bad for an evening’s work!

On Tuesday it rains, Guy has a Woodlands Trust meeting and I play with the rockwool in the bits near where the stove is going to be, and do more polystyrene cutting. I’d have got more done, only it takes me two hours to complete my 20 minute journey home from work because of the flooding…

On Wednesday it rains and I get a haircut, so there’s no shed progress…

On Thursday it rains and we finish the polystyrene cutting and clean up totally so that we can paint the concrete floor. This means sweeping and hovering… so much DUST! It’s coming up off the concrete, so we figure if we paint the floor the dust will stop. We hope.

On Friday it rains and I slap a coat of paint on the floor when I get home from work. The concrete just soaks up the paint, so our careful calculations of how much we need are miles out, and I only get the storage bit done.

On Saturday it rains and we hear that Derek can’t come to do plasterboarding – nothing to do with his tattoo hurting, rather that he’s forgotten it’s his wife’s weekend off so they’re having some family time. Quite right too… plasterboarding can wait. (Well, for a bit anyway!) We decide to do the bits that we were going to do with him when he arrived – like putting extra battens in the roof and putting quadrant beading round the doors and windows.

We do the roof bits first, which means taking the polystyrene out, putting the batten in, recutting the polystyrene (or rockwool for the back section where the fire flue is going through the roof) and putting it back in. More mess!

We do all of that then play with the beading round the doors and windows. Fiddly stuff… and my mitre corners aren’t as perfect as they could be but we decide we’ll fill any gaps with wood filler and stain them!

Then we clean up again… we sweep and hoover, buy more paint and paint it – looks good! Almost like a room!

On Sunday it rains even more and we give up on All Things Shed. We go to the farmers market (where Blunkett and I share a boar burger – suddenly she’s My Bestest Friend In The Whole World) and then to IKEA where we look at wardrobes and possible storage things for melodeons and guitars for when Guy moves in. When we’re looking at shelving for the melodeons I ask how many he has, and he eventually works out it’s 6. ‘Only 6?’ I ask, and can already hear the cogs whirring as he figures that’s the thumbs up to go and buy another one… 5 guitars too, for the record… One of them is very beautiful, so we may hang it somewhere as ‘art’.

When we get home we admire our painted floor and think about colours for the walls to go with the pale green woodwash we’ve already bought… we’re thinking ‘ivory’ for the ceiling (rubbish name, it’s more of a cream really) and ‘cookie dough’ for the walls. Also a rubbish name – ‘soft brown’ would be better. Although, given our equally rubbish names for most of our cakes, who are we to criticise?!

Achieved: The shed is ready for plasterboarding… Apart from filling my lousy mitre corners on the beading, there’s nothing more we can do.
Hours worked: LOTS, mostly in the evenings!
Purchases: Ooh, where to begin? A light fitting for the storage area, green woodwash for the stud wall, plastic sheeting and masking tape to protect the woodwork when we’re plastering, floor paint…
Pressies: A doormat from mum for the shed so that Blunkett can wipe her feet.
Wildlife update: No sign of the fox, but a tabby cat quite likes the evening buffet…
Irritating catchphrase of the week: We watched Gordon Ramsay’s Cooking Live thing on Friday night, which was frenetic and probably put most people off cooking before they’d started, but every 20 seconds or so he’d smack his right fist into his left palm and say ‘DONE!’ So of course we’re both now doing it… ‘Floor painting [smack]… DONE!’ It’s only Sunday and it’s already driving us nuts.
Plan for the week: Wait for Derek to do the plasterboarding. Or we could start it ourselves. Nah, we’ll wait for Derek!
Hope for the week: An end to this wretched RAIN… we’ve never seen such soggy squirrels!