A busy weekend

We accomplished a lot of small jobs this weekend:

• Filled, sanded and painted the shower room window.
• Finished touching up the downstairs loo and cleaning up the paint on the windows (I never claimed to be perfect!)
• Painted some drawer fronts from our bedroom cupboards
• Raked out and filled cracks in the bedroom walls
• Raked out loose paint from the windows in our bedroom
• Pulled up and got rid of carpet from our bedroom and the two staircases
• Prepared the sitting room for the decorator by removing ancient curtain tracks and sundry hooks and writing the paint colours on the wall
• Purchased new knobs for our cupboards 

Goodbye yellow pipes!

The downstairs loo is now sparkling white.  We're pleased to see the back of the dingy yellow in there at least. 

We treated ourselves to a meal out on Saturday night and went to the Crown.    This evening we decided to go for a walk to get some fresh air, but it started raining as soon as we had got round the corner so we stood under a tree for a while and then walked on and stood under another tree and in the end cut our losses and walked round in a much smaller circle than we intended and got back home.

Tomorrow the man sanding the sitting room floor returns to finish off.  Perhaps a couple more days.  He's making an excellent job and it will look great.

Also arriving tomorrow is a decorator who is going to do the halls and stairs and the sitting room.  We shall see great progress in the next couple of weeks, though we think he has underestimated the time it's going to take him.

The decorating begins!

The builders have gone!!  And taken all our money!!

The house is ours again.  Billy, the decorator who has painted all our houses in Norwich at intervals over the last 40 years, has been and stayed for a week at Southwold to paint the kitchen.   It was a great favour to us as Billy has tried to retire for several years but keeps getting enticed back by his old clients.   All the kitchen equipment has now been rescued from various nooks and crannies round the house, washed and  installed in the kitchen and we can cook!  This is our first weekend actually staying at the house since Easter.

Today we have started on the make over of the downstairs loo.  Nothing dramatic, just swapping the yellow paint for white. 

We are trying to clear out the lounge so that a man can come and sand and varnish the floorboards.  He starts on Monday.  In moving some furniture we came across the remnants of an old hearth in the half of the room that no longer has a fire place.  They might just be Georgian or Victorian...so we are cleaning them up so they can be seen as a bit of house history.

Another decorator is booked to come and paint the halls and the living room and we have a date for the kitchen floor to be laid.  We're steadily making progress.

Raised beds filling up gradually.

Outside the garden still looks rather bare but some plants are in.  We need some large pots and a tree and I need to find time towards the end of the month to put in the 50 bulbs I've bought.

The beginning of the herb garden