Strange days

It’s getting much colder now and the weather has been shocking, wind and rain for days and it’s time to remove the final few radiators and sort out the walls behind them. Great! We are waiting to hear exactly when the plumber will come to fit our new ones, but we need to be ready whenever that is, so we put in some very long days. 

The skirting boards arrive, they are so long we only have one place to put them (the living room), and we need to get them fitted as soon as possible. Now, cutting skirting board is easy with a big saw that does fancy angles as well as straight cuts (working out the correct angle less so) but it produces enormous amounts of dust, I mean it belts out, covering everything. Having removed all the doors, and being a relatively small place, this means there is no escape. Everything is covered in very fine wood dust, which is OK, but it gets everywhere. Add to this, the fact we use the electric sander to sand some of the final wall mess behind the now removed radiators, and sometimes we have a pea soup of a fog in the house. Thank goodness for masks and windy days where is blows out of the window quickly.

Ian gets to work measuring cutting and fitting the skirting and it looks great. You will gather as things progress we both like simple, clean lines, so this is perfect for us, it takes several days, but most of it is in and the dust begins to settle. Everywhere. My hair is now completely stuck together when I take my hair band out, it stays up (ew) and it is far too cold and wet with no heating to wash it, so I pretend it isn’t happening and carry on.

While Ian is doing the skirting, I need to find jobs that mean I can move, stop or get out of the way reasonably quickly, so I have some strange days, I stuff insulation in the cavity of the wall we built. It would have been so much easier to do that as we built it, but we didn’t, so a tiny stick and time gets it full. 

I clean the surround to the light tube that takes hours and decided to paint the bathroom ceiling with undercoat. 

When we got here, the only room that wasn’t yellow and didn’t smell was the bathroom, so we left it. It is the only room in tact and we will replace it later when we have done most of the rest. But, it turns out, having a beautifully non-smelly house and white paint everywhere else, the bathroom does smell and it is yellow! 

The bathroom is a bit odd. There is clearly a very expensive jacuzzi bath, but no amount of cleaning is going to persuade us that the recirculating water through the jets would be clean having seen what the house was like, so that will go, as will the tiles and shower. I have never seen a shower head like it. We think it is something to do with a gas burner, and the plumber said the same, whatever happens that will go. The light tube is cool and helps with a dark(ish) room, so that’s staying, but as I paint it becomes clear how yellow it was. I suppose it’s not a surprise, but it is hard to believe we thought it was white.  

And then, the day comes when the skirting needs painting. Now, we haven’t worried about dust with emulsion, but with satin/gloss, it’s going to be a problem!  The place is full of dust, and all we have is the vacuum that is designed as a dust extractor for power tools, not floors and a brush. So, I set to work, trying to become dust free. Now clearly this is a big step forward we are moving from building site to home, but it takes a lot of swishing with a small nozzle to sort this lot!