Spare room decorating: Day 5

Big painting day today, starting with the second coat of gloss on the picture rail and then moving on to the ceiling, where I hope one coat of white emulsion will be enough (I hate painting ceilings). I'm using the same builder's grade white emulsion on the walls above the picture rail.

After lunch I moved down to apply the first coat of peach emulsion to three walls and once that was complete it was obvious that the walls above the picture rail needed another coat of white, so I cracked on with that too.

I would have finished painting earlier had it not been for the arrival of the OvenU man to clean our range. For the first couple of days after we moved in we were convinced there was a gas leak in the kitchen, but it turned out to be the cooker - it was absolutely filthy. We did our best to clean the worst off the main oven so that we could use it, but we didn't want to go anywhere near the grill pan which was an inch deep in rancid fat. Nikki found these guys online - they turn up, take your cooker apart, clean it with industrial-strength stuff and reassemble it. We had them do the cooker hood too, which was also thick with grease. It took the man almost four hours but by the time he'd finished it looked like new. Trouble was whenever I came down from the decorating for a brew, he'd regale me with oven-cleaning tales. Each cuppa ended up taking half an hour!

The second distraction was the arrival mid-afternoon of our new bedroom furniture from Ivy House. After several weeks' searching online we finally went for the Quebec range and it was delivered today in twelve packages (plus mattress). The delivery guys were very helpful and agreed to take most of them up to the first floor, but the two largest wouldn't go up the stairs, prompting Nikki to worry that we'd have to send the whole lot back. I was pretty sure that whatever was in those parcels would fit once the packaging was removed, but even so there's always that small voice of doubt.

Fortunately we'd already arranged to eat with Annie at Wetherspoons so she gave me a lift up with (what turned out to be) the headboard and footboard for our new sleigh bed. Nikki was keen to get the bed assembled - we'd moved our old bed into the study the previous night to leave room for the delivery - so it was another late night by the time we'd figured out where everything went.

Well, not quite everything. We had two strange looking feet left over when it was all put together. Just blocks of wood really with rubber feet on, and a bag containing ten screws. There were no instructions with the bed, and it was too late to work it out, so we gave up wondering and went to bed.