The weekend before Christmas
Did an odd thing this week and decided to take the Thursday off rather than the Friday. Friday being the day before the weekend before Christmas was to be the break up day at work so it made sense, not only Christmas lunch but also a flier – an early finish – so it made even more sense. It used to be toys and party day too with a gratuitous knock-out booze-up in the Linthorpe but times have changed now, all that could be expected of the Linthorpe now was a smattering of staff with a pint each before an apology and an early exit and not the lusty bunch of pirates we used to be.
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Thursday is a bit of a blank now, I know I should write these things down but I get drawn in by my own confidence of the moment, y’know how would I ever forget this and then two hours later I promptly forget it.
I reckon I spent the day filling and sanding, filling and sanding and repeat… I’m so dozy I can’t remember it at all, I do remember spending the day convinced it was Friday though and hankering after listening to the Friday film review, but that’s about all I remember. Am I losing it 🙂
So the next day, the Friday, I was meant to be putting my little girl to bed after an afternoon off from work, but as that didn’t turn out to plan and I ended up with an evening to myself I decided to plot down the nuances of my day – literally – on the back of an envelope.
So the day according to envelope:
- Work – 6am start, drive for an hour, work, Christmas lunch, drive home at lunchtime stopping at the shops on my way
- Tesco – buy some food and Christmas booze, first booze in ages, it was strange, it didn’t feel right, I even apologised to the check-out person “I don’t usually buy drink now” I said to the perplexed gent.
- Screwfix – more odds and sods, radiator TRVs, chrome elbows (only bought three when I should have bought six), plug etc..
- B&Q – lots of paint, 5 litres of Timeless, 10 litres of White Cotton and 2.5 litres of brilliant white Satinwood.
- Chat to neighbour about dog poo
- Stuff in from car
- Tea and nap in chair – yes I’m getting old
- Turn up at Anna’s for Izzi, Izzi not there, Anna not there, they’d gone to Nan’s without letting me know, hey-ho.
- Washing in
- Dishwasher emptied
- Sort out shopping and fridge
- All rubbish collected from round house and put out
- Inspect pipes in the garden to try to figure out leak, temporarily fix downpipe
- Clean up the water after it had spilled out from the dehumidifier
- Move the contents of the family room to one end to facilitate painting
- Fixed sander plug
- Sand ceiling
- Painted end walls grey ready for radiators
- Gone online and bought Christmas Presents and more elbows from Screwfix
- Setup dehumidifier
- Bath
- More washing
- No food this evening so beer and crisps before:
- Bed
- Catch up on email
So that’s what I did on Friday, envelopes are really handy things to jot notes on.
So Saturday I had my little girl all day and Sunday was my day to get more things done.
Sans envelope it’s a bit difficult to remember what I got up to, sufficed to say that it involved lots of painting.
Basically I started the day by adding another coat of Thimble Case grey paint to the end walls ready for the radiators. After that it was the job of finishing off the two ceilings with a coat of Dulux Timeless. This really worked well and they look a treat, in a way I think I wished I’d done the walls Timeless too. It still needed a bit more filling and sanding, but it was looking rather splendid now.
Then a four hour slog around the walls, it’s hard to understand why it takes so long but it is a big room and there are lots of fiddly bits. So four hours and all the walls were nicely finished in Dulux White Cotton. I even did the wall where there was a bit of damp, the dehumidifier and fixing the downpipe had helped and it was well on the way to drying out. The wall would stand a bit more filling though!
Then a bit of an inner debate on how to finish the coving and dado and I settled on Dulux brilliant white Satinwood. This is far more difficult paint to handle than the emulsion on the walls, it’s much ickier and if it gets onto ones skin or clothes then it’s a zillion times harder to get off. This coat also needed cutting in order to avoid covering up the wall/ceiling paint, so altogether not an easy job. By the end of the day I’d only got one room done, but that was the trickier of the two rooms, so not bad.
So that was my Sunday, I had planned to finish both the coving and dado in both of the rooms/areas of the family room, to get the floorboards in from outside and a radiator mounted. As always though it just doesn’t ever turn out that way. Turn to the Friday envelope list and this gives the true nature of the beast, the work on the house is drowned out by the odds and sods jobs that one has to do around the house. Saying I just did the painting doesn’t swing it, there was putting the fire on (that’s cleaning it and cutting wood too), finishing off the washing, cleaning up the bombshell of a kitchen etc. etc. etc. it’s just a bit difficult to itemise all these other jobs, they are there though, hiding and waiting to stop me from mounting my new radiators.
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