h2h | house update

I cannot begin to tell you how glad I am that my central heating now works, we still have mucho snow on the ground and temperatures have so far failed to rise above freezing for the last couple of days. Unfortunately, my wood burning stove is still to be connected up so the lounge remains a tad on the chilly side (like whoa!) but the ugly huge sofa is very comfortable if covered in dust. In fact, the entire house is (once again) covered in dust, to the point where a couple of days ago there was a brief period where tweeps on twitter weren't sure if I was having an allergic reaction or suffering from the bubonic plague given how long I sneezed for (clue: several hours).

This morning I finally managed to trundle off to go temp for Welsh Water (or Dŵr Cymru as they're also known as around here), first having to clear my car of the 7" or so frozen to the roof. I took great pleasure in hefting a big chunk of snow off the roof, carrying it carefully across the pavement, lifting it in readiness of throwing it in my front garden and then covering myself from eye level down when I promptly smashed it all to pieces accidentally. Wouldn't have been so bad but I hadn't done up my coat.  Can you say bbbrrrrrr? Completely unrelated to the post at hand, but amused me so I thought I'd share.

So, house progress? Getting there, slowly but surely. Stripping and sanding down the bannisters has taken over a week. Interestingly, we also found evidence of a small fire once the paint came off on the stair section, with blackened areas and the inside of the supporting newel post having dried to near charcoal minus the black. Thankfully, the blaze was obviously small enough that it didn't cause any major structural damage and with a little bit of filling the newel post will be stronger than ever. I will be repainting the staircase once done, but first we had to remove the rock hard drips of paint, the layers of gloss and added bonus of nicotine stains in order to get them looking their best again. Each post is intricately carved, especially the supporting newel post at the bottom, so perhaps you can see why it's taken Mum and I so long to remove the paint and then sand off the remnants of sticky varnish and gloss. In what was, no doubt, Victorian/Edwardian logic, the upstairs bannister is much simpler than the downstairs one, perhaps because guests would never have been invited upstairs. The upstairs version was much nicer to sand as it's rounder and therefore easier, downstairs each spindle is actually square (see bottom two pictures) and the ridges in the newel post drove my mother round the bend.

All the coving is now completely painted (minus the new little room due to more chimney problems letting in water, thankfully after this there are no more chimneys left to fix!). Check out what my kitchen looked like mid-painting and what the dining room still looks like ... sorta:

I say sorta because I got a bit carried away. The ceiling in the dining room is now properly painted (rather than whitewashed to seal the new plaster as in the photo above) and matches the coving. Rather than painting the two remaining bathroom walls the blue needed to finish the room I decided to paint the alcoves on either side of the dining room and lounge chimneys instead, and they look awesome!

Paint colours match the kitchen but I plan to discuss those a little further in future posts so I'm not going to get in to it here, suffice to say that each room is actually painted with three different colours across the four wall sections, which makes it a little more time consuming to finish. But the excitement of getting to put my things away meant I decided to concentrate on downstairs and get three rooms finished before starting new paint colours elsewhere.

THE BREAKDOWN

• Dining room ceiling - done!
• Dining room alcoves - stick a fork in them!
• Living room alcoves - just as tasty looking
• Dining room chimney breast - partially painted, ready for the roller!
• Bannisters (up and down) - sanded and ready for re-painting ... mostly (3 spindles left to go!)
• Homemade wooden spoon oil cooked up (check me out!)
• One kitchen worksurface re-oiled with above oil (looks great!)

NEXT ON THE LIST

• Paint the chimney in the dining room
• Finish the bannisters
• Paint living room ceiling
• Paint living room chimney
• Clean (this sneezing is killing me)! And prep downstairs for new flooring

Next update in a fortnight. Big changes ahead peeps, big. Huge. Like whoa!*

* I don't know why that phrase amuses me so much but it does, bear with me, I'll get bored of it shortly. Promise.