Calming down
Time for another weekly update! Things have been a bit slower this week. It feels like we’ve done quite a few of the quick wins and we’re now getting into the longer haul tasks. The house is definitely starting to feel more like our house rather than just a place we’re squatting.
For a brief 6 hours or so I was enjoyed a lack of any open orders with Screwfix - That feels like progress.
We got an amazing card from G&G!
Stats about the house
🗻 We have 62 stairs. That’s 31% of a Whitby Abbey, and about 62 more than we’re used to dealing with.
🚽 The percentage of lockable bathroom doors has gone from 20% up to 60%! A huge increase in being civilised.
🔑 We’ve got 5 keys that we haven’t figured out yet, but we also have 10 locks that we can’t find the keys for…
The Front Door
One of the mega tasks for this week was painting the front door. We’ve decided to take it from one shade of green to another shade of green. Unfortunately, this journey from one green to another has quite a few steps. Most of these steps meant that we couldn’t close the front door and Nikki had to keep working in the cold.
Nikki didn’t manage to quite finish the painting before the end of the week, but we’re nearly there. I thought that I’d managed to lock both of us out of the house at one point, but I’d just re-installed the lock the wrong way up 🤦♂️
The Guest Bedroom (5F)
Whilst Nikki was enjoying herself with improving the front door, I was working in the guest bedroom. Last week I was extolling the virtues of the wallpaper stripper and while it was very good, there was still an enormous amount of fiddly little bits that needed to be taken off with a damp cloth and patience. Some bits needed removing with brute force and a willingness to polyfilla later. Once a suitable amount of pollyfilla had been scraped on and sanded down we could move on to the painting.
I (Ozzy) really don’t like painting. I appreciate the results of it, but I don’t like the actual activity of rolling or brushing. I don’t mind masking things off though so I bought myself a new toy to help speed things along 😁
This was the first time using the paint sprayer and it didn’t go quite to plan. I failed to dilute the paint so we ended up with a super thick layer of paint that took ages to dry. Fortunately not enough to cause drips, but not far off 😬
At some point in the future I’m hoping someone invents some sort of paint grenade that I can just throw in a room and shut the door.
Master Bedroom
The master bedroom has my least favourite light fitting in the house (and there’s quite a variety of bad ones). This week I removed it, expecting the replacement to arrive later that day. The replacement has been delayed, but we both think a lack of light fitting is still progress in this case.
We also put up some curtains. The centre curtain pole support broke in half during this, and our woodglue is still in Harrow :( But finally we can use cloth to block out the light instead of just wood.
Other Progress
We also got a variety of smaller things done as well
- Kitchen and bathroom design discussions. First designs should be available in a week or so.
- Organised damp-proofers and roofers (Damp-pRoofers?) to get started on keeping our house dry
- Finishing off the office ready for work
- Finished off the shelves in the master bedroom. They can support all of the clothes we’ve currently got in the house.
- Cleaned some more windows.
- Fixed the leaking tap in the top floor bathroom again. With more PTFE tape and force this time.
- Tried out woodfiller for various fittings that have stripped their screwholes
- Played some fun games of magnetic fishing trying to figure out where we can put ethernet cables with the minimum of fuss
- Enjoyed our first trip to the local tip to get rid of all the old carpet we pulled up
- Not quite a house task - Replaced the rear windscreen wiper
Summary
Doing tasks in this house is exhausting. Especially when there are two people doing tasks and there’s only one complete toolkit between them. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve needed to trek up and down multiple storeys to find the right sized screwdriver.
Doing (half of) the washing up every night is also exhausting. We can’t wait until the dishwasher arrives.
We didn’t manage to get out and about in Bath and the surrounding area, but we’ve got a walk that we’re planning on doing once the front door can be closed and locked. We did manage to visit the butchers again though. Yum yum yum
Next week we’ve got two whole days of gainful employment to look forward to, followed by two days of actually moving our stuff into the new house! 🎉 Nikki’s continuing to remind me that we need to tidy the new house in preparation for this. We also need to figure out where all of our stuff is going to go
The magnolia in our front garden is starting to bloom 😊
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