New New Lounge

I threatened to return to decorating tales once the 100 Themes Writing Challenge was done, so this is me making good on that threat.

At the start of the year we decided to try and make 2012 the year the house was "finished." Although we're going to miss that target by a small margin, we have made amazing progress. The current project (which has been going on, unbelievably, longer than the aforementioned Challenge) is now nearing completion, with only a radiator to fit (due this coming Friday), new oak floor to lay (originally planned for the following Monday but now put back a week - to the 19th November - by the fitter) and some furniture to find, but we won't let the lack of new furniture prevent us from occupying what has become known as the "new new lounge" once construction and decor are complete.

"New new lounge"? Yes, well we did use this room as a lounge when we first moved in, but after suffering heat exhaustion during the summer of 2007 we decided to swap the lounge and dining room around, and moved into what was then the "new lounge" in August 2008.

But, you know, nothing ever stands still in the madcap world of the Beresfords. We've enjoydured four winters in that (North-facing) lounge, and now decided that, after all, we'd like it a little bit warmer. Since the main source of the infernal heat in the South Lounge (the polycarbonate-roofed conservatory) has now been demolished:

...and replaced with some nice new, double-glazed, argon-filled bi-fold doors, this room should hopefully be a lot cooler in summer. The scabby looking space where the conservatory once stood, along with the old decking to the left, is all due to be spiffed up once our Totally Fabulous Garden Design begins to be realised (another start date that has had to be put back, this time on account of garden peeps being delayed on other projects by the inclement weather). On the other side of those bifold doors, what was the dining room...

... has been transformed over the past five months (yes, it's been a long project, mainly because we started with the bifold door replacement and then arranged just about every other removal/ installation/ trade piecemeal thereafter) into its current state - new fireplace, old radiator stripped out, additional sockets and aerial points installed, plasterwork reskimmed, every surface painted (walls with Dulux Chic Shadow), so it currently looks like this:

with, as I said, the floor still to be replaced with lovely, smooth, draught-free American White Oak. Nearly there!

Frog hops to it

After last week's disappointment, masking-tape-wise, I bit the bullet yesterday and went into repair mode, sticking short lengths of Frog Tape on the newly-painted walls under the damaged sections of ceiling, applying daubs of white emulsion, and pulling the tape off immediately to avoid it becoming too well stuck.

A single circumnavigation of the kitchen proved 100% successful this time, and there's now a crisp even line between walls and ceiling with no gaps or tears. Phew. At one point I had visions of getting into a kind of painting loop. Masking the ceiling and painting the walls and then masking the walls and painting the ceiling and then repeat from #1. It didn't happen, I'm relieved to say.

Now we have to settle in for a long wait before the new floor is fitted. Everything was going according to plan until this week. The floor fitter became nervous that the kitchen fitter hadn't confirmed his dates, and so pushed us back a week to avoid having nothing booked in next week. When the kitchen fitter did eventually come up with a date (w/c Sep 12) this strategy was proved right, as this was a week later than we were expecting. Anyway a deathly hush of no progress has now fallen on the kitchen until a week Monday.

New newels a-coming

Our mental schedule had the new stairs being fitted after May Bank Holiday, so it was a surprise to receive a phone call last week to say all the "product" was ready and they had a fitting appointment free next week.

Fortunately I'd been pressing on with the decorating so that we would stand a chance of being ready whenever they were, and the intervening weekend gave ample time to complete the last phase of the painting - the top coat on the woodwork (at least around the stairs area) - before the joiners arrive on Tuesday.

I set to yesterday morning with a brand new tin of Dulux Satinwood - my "gloss" of choice for many years owing to its classy satin finish, but by teatime I was beginning to worry that it was taking an awfully long time to dry. A tentative touch in an out-of-the-way corner gave a surprising result: it was dry already. Dry and glossy. Not what we wanted at all.

At first I thought Dulux had suffered a manufacturing wobbler and packaged regular gloss in a Satinwood tin, but as usual Google is your friend, and a quick search threw up several references to DIY and professional decorator forums where everyone was bemoaning the new paint mix - light on volatile organics as per new EU regulations, and consequently taking much longer to dry out properly than it used to.

"Don't worry," wrote one professional long-time user of Satinwood, "you'll see the difference after 24 hours, but it can take a couple of weeks before the satin effect is completely there."

Sure enough this morning the high gloss sheen is already toned down a couple of notches. Phew.

The last coat...

...is in sight.

For today, a bonus: I finished before 2.30pm. Second coat of undercoat on the front door (that's the last of the undercoating) and cutting in the second emulsion coat on walls and ceiling, leaving only the rolling to do. That'll be a quick job, so I'm on track for an early finish tomorrow too :o)

Another thing that came to mind as I carefully cut in around the dado rails and skirting: this job marks the final demise of the rag-rolled flame-effect colours that used to dominate the whole house; a legacy of the previous owners. Flame yellow in the dining room, orange and red in the living room, blood-red in the bathroom. One by one they've been built over, plastered over, painted over, or all three. The last bastion of rag rolling was the sub-dado area in the hall and stairs. Orange and yellow, it was. Now it's only visible as a slight mottling of the first coat of white emulsion in the photo here. The second coat, coming tomorrow, will be enough to see it off for good.

I researched the Feng Shui-ness of these colours. Knowing a little about those previous owners I'm pretty certain the colours were chosen for a reason - along with the copper, gold and bronze paint they used on all the picture rails. Sure enough, they're all "Yang" colours. All associated with vitality, ambition, joy and optimism. Interesting to note during my research that white - now the predominant colour of the hall - is the "colour of ultimate purity." It is, allegedly, "an all around colour of protection, bringing peace and comfort, alleviating emotional shock and despair, helping cleanse emotions, thoughts and spirit."

I think that's a pretty good choice for the first room you enter after an exhausting day at the coalface of life. All we need now is to add in a little gold. Because it is "related to abundance and power, higher ideals, wisdom, understanding" and is "mentally revitalising, energising and inspiring." Just what we need.

Sand(ing) in my eyes

It's done!

In the end, power tools were the answer. Or, a power tool, to be precise. A detail sander:

A recent purchase intended to speed up the task of smoothing off large areas of unfinished purlin (at which it excelled), I was always going to use it on the front door panels. They stretch the entire width of the hall and would have taken an age to do by hand. Once I got started with this little wonder and a pack of 25 sanding sheets, I thought I may as well carry on. It made short work of the dado, skirting, and door frames, allowing me to finish in a single afternoon an area almost double that which has already taken two weekends to do manually.

Power tools. Always the answer. Yes, I did wear a mask.

More acreage to paint

And just like that, the plastering is all done. It only happens "just like that" from my perspective. The other perspective - that of a plasterer balancing on a plank that is resting between a rung of a ladder and another plank, with the second plank itself stretched between a second ladder and a set of steps, holding a hawk loaded with plaster in one hand and applying it with a trowel held in the other - doesn't bear thinking about!

Two men yesterday, and three men today. Five man days. It's a big job.

For my part, after two weekends of sanding the landing is ready to paint. Four doorways, skirting and dado rail. Only I won't start painting until the rest of the sanding is done. Prep first, paint last. So still to come, there's the dado down the stairs. Apron. Window on the stairs. Front door (all wood panels, the width of three doors), five more doorways. More dado and some picture rail thrown in for good measure. Oh, and the cornice in the hall. Then I can paint all that, together with two ceilings, stair well, and all the walls that'll need two coats of high density white emulsion, and then a couple more coats of the mid-gray tone we've chosen for the sub-dado area.

And this, don't forget, is not the aforementioned Large Decorating Project. Oh no. This is just the Piddling Little Decorating Project That Will Do To Be Going On With.

Here's some "before and after" pics to keep you occupied while I finish sanding. The "before" ones are post-wallpaper-stripping. The "after" ones show the new plaster in the process of drying out.

Beware the painted hair

Had the new radiator fitted in the bedroom today - one large double to replace the three smaller singles that were connected in series beneath each of the bay windows. A positive side-effect of this is that I can now get to those final small sections of skirting board that were previously hampered by the old pipework.

Whoever installed the heating in this house originally had some funny ideas about plumbing. Like running the pipes as close as humanly possible to the skirting board, which meant when it came time to fit thermostatic radiator valves they had to chisel out part of the plaster to make room for them! And that there was no room behind the pipes to get to the boards for painting.

With the new rad sitting proudly beneath the central window and the old pipes removed, around nine inches of skirting board on each side needed sanding down, undercoating and glossing, and that small area of wall required a spot of filler and some Gentle touching up :o)

While I was on my knees with the undercoat, I noticed a paintbrush bristle painted into the wall. I usually spot these and pick them off while the paint is going on, but this was close to the top of the skirting boards and had escaped my attention. Since one end had dried sticking up it was easy to slip a nail under it and remove the offender.

Or so I thought.

The paint-hardened bristle had achieved unexpected strength, and stabbed me under the fingernail, drawing blood. Ow! Next time I'll be using a blade!

Everything stops for tea

Remember that old ditty about the English penchant for afternoon tea? It covers a lot of ground, talking about various activities that all stop for tea, and the final verse goes:

Now I know just why Franz Schubert
Didn't finish his unfinished symphony
He might have written more but the clock struck four
And everything stops for tea

We have it all wrong in this house at the moment. Everything stops for painting.

Yesterday: undercoat. Today: gloss. Picture rail, windows (three of them, with it being a bay), and skirting board. Takes between six and seven hours to get round the whole room - longer than doing the walls because by this stage I have to be careful with the edges, and there are a lot of edges - so it's no wonder I feel like I've done a day's work by the time I'm finished.

As for tea, well I don't stop for it. I drink it on the go. Mind you, that doesn't have to mean a break with tradition. I've been picking up my brush around 8am, so by the time "the clock strikes four" I'm done with painting for the day!

The mask of doom

Masking tape and I have never quite hit it off.

However, since my worst experiences from years gone by have been with the older, traditional "beige" tape, the more modern painter's tape is specifically designed for the purpose and supposedly does a MUCH better job (quote from the main website: "This is the advantage of using low-stick tape: you can press it down very hard without worrying about the tape pulling the paint up."), and Nikki had expressed a preference for edges that were considerably less wobbly, I put my reservations to one side and applied a few metres of the tape - as reported yesterday.

I should have known better.

It's my own fault really. For not sticking to my guns in the first place and, worse, for not abandoning the idea after a very early indication of likely failure (I'd had to reposition the second piece of tape, and it took off some of the ceiling paint when I moved it).

So after slapping a second coat of Armagnac onto the chimney breast at lunchtime, I spent an increasingly frustrating 40 minutes this evening removing the tape, and an even more frustrating 45 minutes painting over the holes it left in my lovely white ceiling. Not a single piece of tape came off without some damage, and at a guess I'd say around 90% of the total length of tape used came off with some ceiling attached. Even more annoying, much of the paint removed was right on the edge, so repairing the gaps - sans tape - meant the reintroduction of wobbly edges, thereby rendering the whole exercise a complete waste of time.

I spent much of the rest of the evening with my grumpy face on.

A search of online information sources reveals a possible reason for the problem: "Normal Blue Painter's tape should not be used on faux, delicate finishes, lacquer or new paint finishes that have been done less than one month." What? Who in the world suspends a decorating project for ONE MONTH while one half of the job cures to the point where masking tape can be used? Tch!

It's a record

Achieved superluminal velocities after work while belting around the 'Gentle' walls, completing the task in under two hours thanks to (a) it being the second coat and (b) the judicious application of masking tape around the ceiling and chimney breast.

A straight edge was required by the Mistress of Ceremonies so I'd been round during lunchtime with the ScotchBlue™.

Colour my world

The good news is that yesterday morning saw the second (white) undercoat go on with no damage to the initial coat. I got away with it.

But if the undercoat turns a decorating project from a building site back into a room, then the next phase - applying the colour - brings that room to life. After a considerably shorter painting session than either of the previous two days, on account of having Nikki's help doing the low-level cutting in while I was working on those parts only accessible from a step ladder, this was the result.

The picture doesn't really do justice to the colours. It's the first coat so still a little patchy, and the full effect won't be brought out until the picture rail and skirting get their fresh new white paint, but it gives an idea of the final look. The lighter shade, which covers all the walls apart from the chimney breast, is Crown's "Gentle" matt emulsion, while the accent colour is provided by their "Armagnac." Yeah, I know. We had that conversation about "who chooses the names of the colours" too.

Second coat tomorrow night after work, and then "only" the woodwork remains. Radiator fitting booked for next Monday. Carpet fitting booked for the week after next, but I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to bring that back three or four days and give us a weekend to move all the furniture back in.

The Call of the Wood

Been fixing up and painting the bathroom door since Sunday. Don't know about you, but when I'm doing a job as mindless as painting, my hand might be painting but my mind is otherwise engaged. Plotting The Literary Novel (as it's recently become known in my head), or testing out snippets of conversation between the main characters (or even minor ones come to that), or generally wool-gathering.

Something of the manual activity has patently impinged on my consciousness though, manifesting itself in two painting-related gatherings of wool. 1: how stripped doors sound attractive until you actually see them, and 2: how I'm probably bringing these doors full circle (or actually, more like 540°, because clearly being wood, they started life as... well... bare wood).

I like stripped wood as a rule. A few (umm... probably about 12) years ago I took a hot-air stripper and a shave-hook to the wooden window casings in the main bedroom of the family cottage, gradually revealing the mellow silkiness of their ancient yellow pine, but it was a task to remove all evidence of old repairs - every last lump and grain of filler - sand the wood to a fine smooth finish and then apply copious quantities of beeswax-based polish to feed and nurture the wood until it gleamed. The end result soon dulled the memory of the hours of exhausting, boring stripping, sanding and buffing.

The previous owners of this house had an altogether more slapdash approach to their stripped wood. As far as I can tell it involved a quick dunk in a bath of chemical stripper and... er... that's yer lot. For the most part, this left the doors looking rough and ill-treated. Exposed splits and cracks in the old timber, long clumps of old grey filler in the spaces between the carcass and the mouldings, lines of yellowed dots where the filled nail heads lived, and all the long years' scratches and gouges in full view. And then, to add insult to injury, they'd painted on a wash of disgusting blue woodstain that gave them, if anything, an even sadder and more forlorn aspect.

Quite the most depressing example of stripped wood I'd ever seen and one of the earliest mental notes I made during our first visit to the house. Hence Thought #1 above.

Thought #2, bubbling into view as the brush turned the dirty matt effect into smooth fresh white, is the realisation that all I'm doing is returning the doors to the state they'd more than likely been in when the previous owners first arrived. All trace of the expense of the chemical dipping, and the splashing on of dishwaterlike stain, will soon be erased. Makes me wonder if, at some remote future point, a new owner of this house will have an urge for stripped doors and set to to re-undo all my hard work. No wonder B&Q (aka Home Depot) profits remain healthy.

An absence of being moist

Ever been irritated and satisfied at the same time? I finished those small (re)decorating tasks today, finally. So the irritating part is that small jobs like this (I reckon all three areas we're talking about here add up to no more than 25 square feet) need just as many individual visits - stain stop; replastering; two coats of paint; and, in the case of the study ceiling/walls, additional days because the ceiling and walls can't be done on the same day owing to one or other edge being wet - as a much larger project. Which means just as many brush- and roller-cleaning events too.

The satisfying part should be obvious. We now have a kitchen ceiling that doesn't stare balefully down at you with its one plaster eye (albeit the painted part is slightly whiter than the non-painted part, but that's only temporary), the landing doesn't look so much like a building site, and the study doesn't have that mouldy, mottled, bubbling aspect of something out of Skellig's shed. Result! It's only taken a week.

Or two years, if you count the elapsed time.

A coat of single colour

After our first couple of experiences of decorating in this house, we'd normally be waiting until a room had been skimmed before painting, but this is a special case. Not only has the bricked-up-doorway-and-replacement-window area already been plastered, but it's likely to be a while before the rest of the room gets the same treatment and before then we have a fireplace to rearchitect, so painting was called for. Not to mention the fact that we chose and bought the paint about two years ago, and wanted to use it before it dried up in the tin.

It was a close call. As it was the colour had settled into a 2-inch thick gloopy layer on the bottom of the tins (we bought two), requiring a good 20 minutes stirring to restore the emulsion to its rightful appley greenness.

After that, we were off. Cutting in and rollering for all we were worth. And trying, against the odds, to get enough coverage from a single coat to avoid having to do any more painting tomorrow. It almost worked.

Knowing that tomorrow would bring only a relatively small amount of repainting, we repaired to the Marble beer house for a well-earned pint or two. Ever noticed how beer tastes funny when you've the smell of emulsion up your nostrils?

Midsummer Night's Dream

Another full day's painting - second coat of white undercoat - left us with just enough time to grab a bite to eat before heading off to the local church hall to take the photos for Chorlton Players' latest production A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I'm not a huge fan of Shakespeare and much of the first scene left me cold, but once we moved onto the fairy scenes I began to appreciate the narrative a little more but also to revel in the wonderful costumes and makeup that the group had devised. This was a dream for a photographer and I think Paul had a lot of fun too, judging by how many shots he took.

A relatively early finish (around 10pm) was followed by the usual long session of winnowing out the best pix, correcting any errors and assembling posters to be stuck up around the entrance to the show tomorrow night. All this after a long day's painting means I am really ready to collapse into bed.

A different kind of painter

Having spent a couple of days at the coast, we were used to seeing painters. The nautical kind. Today I turned back into a painter myself as we began day one of kitchen painting - the first coat of white on the new plaster, and across all of the old flame-effect rag rolling that is (was) a consistent theme around the whole house when we moved in.

We decided, with African Night coming up, it would be nice to have the kitchen restructuring looking as if it belonged to the rest of the room and not sticking out like a sore thumb. Moving furniture, cutting in, and rollering the whole room (sub-picture rail) took the entire day.

All quiet on the lounge front

Nothing's ever simple, as I've mentioned several times in the past on this blog. Even the simplest job will turn out to have some weird glitch to trip you up. Yesterday's glitch was the size of my gun. Not big enough by a long shot (haha!).

Yes the day was taken up with those last few tidy-up jobs that mark the end of another decorating era. Screwing the power sockets back on, touching up the paint splashes, runs, and missed bits, sweeping up the dust and paint shavings, removing the tools from the work area.

And finally, in this case, applying a bead of sealant to the skirting boards to stop the howling gale that blows up from the sub-floor and would, if not stopped, turn the edges of the new carpet black in no time. The first tube of sealant went down without incident, being a tube I had left over from the last job. When I came to cut the seal off the next tube though, I realised I had a problem. I'd bought two trade-sized tubes of decorator's caulk, and they were just two inches too long to fit in my standard, amateur's gun.

An emergency dash to B&Q, fast becoming the highlight of every single DIY project I've ever undertaken, was called for. There are no photos on this blog entry, because the sight of me in my decorating clothes is one I don't normally share with the world. Apologies then to those few poor unfortunates who happened to choose this particular rainy Sunday afternoon for a shopping trip to B&Q, and thereby suffered an even greater shock than such an outing would normally visit upon them.

Ten pounds poorer but with a professional caulking gun in hand (and two regular-sized tubes of caulk too, in case the gun still wasn't the right size), I returned home and finished the job.

Now the lounge sits silently, emptily waiting to have its carpet laid, and every noise from the rest of the house echoes around its newly-decorated, but still spartan, walls.

I might be an anachronism

Yesterday, the painting concluded with that last coat of gloss on the skirting board and door frame. The end is nigh I tell you! It's nigh!

But it occurred to me while I was cleaning the paintbrush I'd used for the undercoat, that I might be becoming an anachronism. Or may even already have achieved it. I mean, do people still clean their paintbrushes?

It's one of those things I do without thinking. One of those "it's the way it is" things. My Dad always - almost religiously - cleaned his brushes, the same way he looked after all his tools. Carefully, lovingly, and with precision. And so, following his example, do I.

On the other hand, back then, paintbrushes and the like were relatively expensive. I don't know what proportion of his wage he would have had to spend on a new brush back in, say, 1965, but I can guarantee it's more than the 0.37% of my (weekly) salary that a new Harris costs. I know the price because I just had to buy a new one. One of my cleaning sessions wasn't quite so diligent as it should have been. A couple of days too late, in fact, to prevent the brush turning into a zombie.

When we had the bathroom done last year I noticed how the tradesmen bought new brushes (at our expense, naturally), used them once and threw them away. I'd never even considered doing this until then. To me, brushes were just part of your toolkit, to be used, reused, and looked after. Now I'm wondering if the best way to avoid filling the house with white spirit fumes, and dumping nasty VOCs down the loo, is just to not clean them in the first place. It's a bit of a culture shock that is, believe me.

We're on the level

So there was this gap in front of the fire, where the new hearth didn't quite come out as far as the old hearth. The fireplace fitter recommended self-levelling compound, as anything else would crack and to leave the gap there would cause the carpet to sag in front of the fire. He advised using a small tub, but the smallest one I could find was 5kg. Still, I thought, may as well mix it all up. I don't need it for anything else and I can just chuck away what I don't use.

There was about a teaspoonful left by the time I'd finished. It kept leaking away UNDER the new hearth. The daft buggers had just sat it there, on top of the floor, bridging over the old concrete plinth.

The compound also leaked through two or three small holes at the front as you can see here. I guess those leaks will have dripped through to the sub-floor. Luckily the holes weren't large enough for the whole mix to disappear before it set sufficiently to stop dripping.

All this does of course mean that we'll never be able to have bare floorboards in the lounge again (unless we fit new boards to this section) but frankly after years of bare floors - stripped pine in this house and laminate in the last - that's not a serious worry. We wanted it cosy, and that means carpet.

The final task for today was to apply the gloss coat to the skirting boards and door frame. This didn't have such a profound effect on the look of the room as yesterday when the undercoat went on. I knew that would be a watershed. Painting the last of the woodwork removed the only remaining rough edges and made the whole project look finished, with just a few bits of tidying up to do. Today's gloss coat just made it... err... glossier.

New light through old windows

It's a pun. Shorthand for two subjects I want to write about today. The inevitable and the inspirational.

Decorating
This, of course, is the inevitable. At least, it will be for the next few years as we traverse the house, repairing the neglect and damage wrought by the previous occupants and restoring the place to some semblance of habitability. In the case of the old windows, I refer to those in the new lounge, which have not seen a brush, mop, leather, squeegee or even vacuum cleaner in however many years it takes to build up a layer of dust and dead bugs several millimetres deep on the rails. There's paint to scrape off, dirt to wash off and broken catches to screw off, but sadly we can't stretch to a full refurb job on these lovely Edwardian sashes just yet, so they'll have to make do with a spit and polish.

So a spit and polish is exactly what I gave them yesterday. One of the hottest days of the year so far and I'm stood with both hands submerged in a bucket of hot sugar soap, with a scrubbing brush for the larger areas and an old toothbrush to winkle out the grime and grit from the lead work. As I've remarked before I'm not wedded to the idea of returning the house entirely to its original state. In 2008 I believe it should be comfortable, functional and benefit from the one-hundred-years of progress we've made since it was built. Even so I love some of the period detail and I would be sad to lose these windows. They may not be the most detailed or interesting examples of leaded lights you've ever seen, but I like their symmetrical simplicity.

Writing
And this is the inspirational. Eyes are the windows of the soul, poets have told us through the ages, and mine can certainly be classed as old, so I've felt ... well, blessed I suppose is the best word for it and, yes, inspired ... this week, to have some new light come in through these old windows in the shape of some fresh perspectives on my writing.

I have a colleague on TV Scoop who regularly bemoans the lack of feedback on his writing and it's true that blogging of any kind, unless you're one of those fortunate enough to appear on a "top 100" list somewhere, is a shot in the dark. With a few notable (and welcome!) exceptions among family and friends, you never really know who, if anyone, is reading your blatherings and from those, who is really enjoying it.

So here's a heartfelt thank-you to those who have felt moved to comment recently. Since childhood, I've never felt comfortable receiving compliments. I put this down to having it drummed into me by my mother that I would become "big-headed." Something, apparently, almost worse than being two-headed, at least in her mind. Whether I overcompensated or what, I don't know, but I've always been very... British... when it comes to compliments. Oh, no, seriously? You liked it? Well...thank you. It's nothing really.

It's nothing really. Why do I say that? It's my life. It's my heart and soul. It's everything, really. And I've already spent almost 50 years denying it. So, I must learn to accept compliments graciously and admit that, yes, your words of encouragement, enjoyment, and even enchantment with my writing have not only touched me deeply but also given me a new impetus. A work-free week stretches before me and I'll be spending as much of that time writing as I can.