Our First Flat

Almost finished now... well, this room at least!

We awoke on Monday morning to find that in a couple of patches where we'd painted over Damp-proof paint - only on the walls where the stupid old tenant had papered over plaster - had peeled off. So we decided to do the sensible thing and actually peel off what we could and fill it properly with filler.

We also touched up a few areas that we'd missed, and then set about the mammoth task of getting the room back in to shape again. The first thing to do was put together the new desk we'd bought (smaller, but more storage area) - we managed it in 45 minutes, almost HALF the time the instructions recommend. RESULT!

The next morning before work Henry put the computer back together and moved the Sofabed back in to place.

Even more room, even less time.

On a bright Sunday morning we got back to work, with the first job of the day being to apply damp-proof paint to the external walls. We decided not to go all the way up, as we were hoping to dry it in the same day so we could paint on top of it. Having done that, and sanded off all the filler, we set to work with the actual paint. First it was the cieling (white, to replace the splotchy yellow and brown it was before) and then the walls, in "Gentle Lavender" (I think). The colour is a strange one - in some light it looks blue, in some purple and others pink. Very odd, but nice anyway - heck, just having the room anything but yellow is good!

Having applied two layers of the stuff, we left it all to dry for the rest of the day. The damp proof stuff probably could have done with a little more time to dry before we painted over it, hence the patchy bits you'll see in the photo below, but it looked fine after some touch-ups. Henry made a few gaffes by getting the wall paint on the white cieling, but it's nothing a bit of cornicing won't cover!

Spare Bedroom, not spare time.

The original plan for this weekend was to fix up a few odds and sods before May, when we've got almost zero free time to play with. Things like the skirting boards and woodwork in the hall, as well as getting the bookshelves out of the spare bedroom in preparation for decorating it at some point in the near future. But sadly all that went out the window when Sara made Henry take the computer apart, purely to "get to the wall". Well, that settled it - if we were going to be without the computer then we'd get that room decorated if it killed us!

So, without much further ado we set about moving everything out, filling in holes, masking off woodwork and preparing the walls and finally cleaning them. We came up against an unexpected hurdle when we realised that 2 of the walls had been wallpapered - I suspect this was due to the walls underneath being freshly plastered, and the previous owner having discovered that when you paint on fresh plaster, it blisters and comes off easily. So, having taken all of the wallpaper off, we wondered whether to take the paint underneath off too, but opted not to, instead filling in any holes with the damp-proof paint.

We would have achieved more from the day, but at that point we both had to go out for the evening - Sara to the opera and Henry to Keith's to do some work.

The first proper barbecue of the season

On Saturday the 2nd of April we hosted the first (proper - i.e. not sat at a workbench!) barbecue of the season. Ros and Keith and baby Barney came round to help us test drive the new barbecue (the first of the two that we bought) and all seemed to go pretty well. The weather stayed nice, the barbecue did what it was supposed to and everyone seemed to have a good time.