Glastonbury weekend
I was once a big festival goer, this weekend was the Glastonbury weekend the calendar biggie, swapping my tent for skirting boarding wasn’t particularly my favourite choice of the two options, but money and time being short it had to be done. The only consolation in the whole of this being that if I get it all done before next year then I can relax in the mud knowing that I have a nice house to go home to and I can discuss the merits of beers in a field in comparison to putting up a set of blinds.
That’s if I have any money left to go to any festivals that is.
Anyway this weekend I took an extra Friday of holiday, the intention was to finally get the bedrooms finished, I forgot however that any job takes five times longer to do than it should. I also forgot that I have an adorable little daughter and sometimes one has to down tools and enjoy some time with her.
Anyway it all started well, I got home from work on the Thursday before the weekend of work, I sorted out the skirting board to be fitted and I scrubbed, sanded and de-nailed it ready for fitting the next morning. A simple-ish job but it took a couple more hours to finish than I’d initially thought. Anyway it was done, not a nice job… but it was done.
The next day I had a complete Friday to crack on with the skirting, I was to get this all done by midday and start with the painting in the afternoon. Weeeellllll it took a bit longer than I thought. By lunchtime I was only a third of the way through the room, the walls aren’t particularly straight in this room, the fact that it once was two uneven sized rooms didn’t help matters, it called for some creative skirting. Also some of the walls needed a bit of packing out in order to keep the skirting vertical, what had once – in my mind – been a simple screwing to wall exercise had now taken on a more interesting guise.
As lunchtime pressed the phone rang too and it was Anna, “Bill, did you know today was Izzi’s sports day and she’d really like you to come”… well I didn’t and I didn’t have the time, however a little persuading later and I’d made up my mind that skirting fitting could wait, it was far more important to see my daughter in her first sports day, I could skirt any day, Izzi’s first sport’s day would only ever happen once.
So an afternoon of skirting was postponed to watch my little daughter coming last in most of the races, to see her try to cheat in the standing jump and employ a stroke of genius to nearly win the bat and ball (egg and spoon) race. It would have seen her on the podium should she not have veered off to her teacher at the finish line. Her “Hawk” team won the overall award but among the team of bouncing, cheering boys and girls one could spot one little girl looking very upset by all the palaver cross-legged on the ground not understanding what all the fuss was about. Yeah it was worth missing an afternoon of work for that.
Anyway once back I pressed on with the job in hand, no sooner had I got to my final wall I realised I didn’t have enough fixings to complete the job. Basically I’d thought that the last wall was a simple stud wall and I thought all I needed was a fistful of standard wood screws. What I’d thought was a stud wall was in fact a brick supporting wall and I needed some hammer in screws and I’d just exhausted my supply. So a job that was running late now just got later, still I had needed to get some shopping in so a trip to Screwfix now became a trip to Tesco too, the room was possibly not going to get finished this weekend now.
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Anyway now late in the day I really needed to get a job completed so I pressed on with the work in hand and by the end of the Friday I’d fixed on all the skirting and wood-filled all the screw holes. So at the death of the Friday I’d only managed to do what I’d intended to do by the lunchtime, still who cares sports day was fantastic.
The next day too was one with my daughter, this was planned though and a fantastic Saturday was spent visiting Grandma and Grandad, Izzi doling out presents and cards for Grandma’s birthday. Then a quick change and off to a Eli May’s 5th birthday party in Staindrop and then off to a dance recital at The Hub in Barnard Castle after another quick change in my house. The show was Peter Pan, Izzi looking unsurprisingly distracted due to the amount of miles and exertion we’d put in that day. I know by the end of the day I was pretty much done in too.
Still Sunday was mine, I’d stayed up late the night before to watch the England ladies progress to the semi-finals of the world cup so it was a bit of a late start the next morning.
Anyway the skirting needed to be tidied up now, basically thewalls were a bit wayward and it needed a lot of skill and effort to get the skirting looking good and primed ready for paint. Again though I needed a trip out to pick up some filler, basically my supply had exhausted and another bag of the wonderful Easi-fill 45 was needed. A trip to B&Q and along with some fixings for the radiators and I was back home.
Anyway a morning, an afternoon and into the evening and the skirting was finished and looking good and ready. The job had taken time as I needed to wait for layers of filler to go off before it could be sanded back to a good finish. There were two types of filler employed too, the wood filler and the Easi-fill and despite the claims to dry in 45 minutes the Easi-Fill was taking longer.
I’d not been idle during these drying periods too, I managed to get a set of wooden blinds up in the other bedroom, I’d done my washing, I’d sorted out the rubbish collections, I’d even sugar sprayed and towelled down all the walls in the big bedroom to remove layers of sawdust that had accumulated from floor sanding and board cutting All this was done to prep for a final layer of paint – basically the room now needed one more coat after all that had gone on since I thought I’d finished the final emulsion.
Anyway another weekend gone and I was ready for paint…