The clock is ticking
I took Friday as a holiday so that meant two days to crack on with the bedroom and the study.
I got up early on Friday, I dressed appropriately in my sombre multi-layered man-about-Screwfix look and pressed on with sorting out the washing and lighting the fire before a quick breakfast. I needed to press on this weekend as time is running out for me to get the house finished, basically I’m so in hock to credit cards that I need to remortgage the house and Catch22 dictates that I can’t remortgage until I’ve finished the house, so it’s all a bit sticky. At the moment my outgoings are outrunning my incomings by a fair amount each month and my contingency is rapidly dwindling, so I needed to get my skates on.
So with a new found fervour for getting things done I started the day and persuaded and pushed myself to get as much work done as I could.
As usual though the day dwindled away with jobs I’d not intended on doing. The corner needed some extra joisting and I had to spend the first half an hour locating suitable structural timber appropriate to the size and nature of the work. Once I had found this it was then up to me to tease it into shape and knock it into place and just like that another hour gone.
I then set about finishing the insulation and taping the joints, again not a huge job but one that quickly gnaws away at the available time. Match this up with some tidying of the sawdust and ephemera that had found its way into the room and lunch was already on the menu.
Still once this was done I could then set about routing the central heating piping and twin and earth into the room. Well just as soon as I’d popped out the floorboards in the corridor, well just as soon as I’d found a sharp hole drill too… OK then… just as soon as I’d gone down to Screwfix and bought a new set of hole drills to drill out the holes. The day felt like one mad panic to get things done, I could have panicked but I don’t do panic.
Anyway on returning from Screwfix I resigned myself to getting just as much done that day as I could. I persuaded myself to get on with the job in hand and reserve any food needs to the end of the day. With this plan in place I pushed myself on and by the end of the day I’d managed to route the ring main for the room and the pipework for the radiator. Not bad, but my initial intentions on doing this work on both the study AND the bedroom had fallen foul of the little demon that eats ones available time, still I could take comfort in that I’d worked as hard as I could have done in the time available.
Next day and I had a trip to Screwfix planned, I could have done this the day before but I’d realised that this trip would take careful planning and I’d not had the time to do this legwork prior to my emergency drill purchase the day before. Anyway to cut a long story short I had a 10% discount voucher burning a hole in my overall pocket and I needed to stretch out this purchase with as many appropriate purchases as I could muster in one visit. In order to do this my previous night’s post-meal and pre-bed time had been spent planning this assault in front of my computer. Basically a list of radiators, TRV’s, pipe insulation etc. had been forged, all items that were truly required and all put into one big order to attract the 10% one-off discount.
The Screwfix trip was preceded by a trip to Tesco’s for supplies and what with an early start I managed to make it back to my house by 10:30 so I still had plenty of time to get on with work before midday. On getting home I resisted the urge to kick back and have a cuppa and managed to get the Screwfix/Tesco booty into the house, the car converted back from being a pick-up truck to a normal car, some more washing in and my shopping put away before the inevitable cup of tea.
Before lunch I spent my time lagging pipes and rolling out insulation into the gaps between the joists.
The afternoon and it was on with the boarding out of the room, it was a chipboard spectacular.
Again a few jobs slowed me down, the skirting needed removing where the chipboard refused to slide under it, despite the carefully planned purchase of chipboard being identical in height to the boards it was replacing. I also needed to shave the ends off some floorboards on the threshold of the room, they were fixed down and needed squaring off, this took ages, my multi-tool blade was blunt and chiselling too ages. It wasn’t until I found a sharp blade for the multi-tool that I cracked it but this little job alone cost me over an hour.
By the end of the day I’d gone managed to board out 80% of the room, again not bad but I would have preferred to have had it finished, hopefully I could get some more work done on Thursday evening and have it finished then – the clock is ticking.