Plan for the Year

It might seem a bit late to be making a plan for the year in mid-May, but nearly everything I need to do is either outside or requires me to make frequent trips outside, and so the weather has been beating me. Right now I am feeling defeated as the forecast was for some cloud, clearing to the east, followed by scattered cloud with possibility of rain; we have actually had overcast cloud with drizzle for the entire day, punctuated by two half hour fool's breaks (you know, when you think you can do something and start, only for the rain to start again).

Anyway, there are jobs to be done and the first is to make a list:

a. Sash windows - two large ones are left to be refurbished, and there is a smaller pair in the bathroom. Hopefully I will get at least the two large ones done this year - one is in the kitchen and the other is in the hall (but there is also some remedial work to do on one of last year's where some putty has slipped).

b. Plastering - I need to do the inset bit at the top of the hall window which is hanging, albeit still complete, plus the three inset bits around the main bedroom window. These bits were all not done in 2010/11 as they looked OK then, but they are showing signs of wear around the edges!

c. Garden walls - I have been doing some repairs to two of the garden walls, and this could continue for ages as they are in pretty poor condition. In many cases I have to remove several stones and carefully remortar them (with NHL3.5) so that they are set solid before I do the next bit above. There is also the front (side) garden wall which I found last year was bowing horribly towards my neighbour's garden - and it is about 10' high, so that's quite a worry. However, that rebuild won't happen this year...

d. The back garden needs lots of tidying where the residue of 2011's work is still apparent, and there's still some ground elder to dig up carefully.

e. Redecoration - I think that 'Er Indoors wants some redecoration in at least one of the back bedrooms and, possibly, the lounge.

I have done some things this year - the wardrobe in a back bedroom was completed back in February, which has allowed a rearrangement of the stuff in our main wardrobe. As another consequence, we have been able to dispose of some items of furniture.

I have also been helping my next elder brother and both my sisters to tidy our parents' house. Mum died in 2015 and Dad is now in a carehome with vascular dementia; at 95, clearly he will not be going home again. I think the house will need to be sold by early next year to pay for the carehome which is really quite expensive. As part of clearing that house in London I have occasionally brought things back home for disposal or sale - such items always take priority over mere house jobs and selling things on eBay is actually quite time-consuming, I think.

The major change this year is that my other half has retired from full-time work. This has been quite an adjustment for both of us, as I had been so used to her disappearing early in the day and arriving back much later in time for an evening meal (made by me); this routine allowed me to work out the day for myself as I wanted, but suddenly there is someone else wanting to use the car, or the bathroom, or whatever room I wanted to work in etc. You get the picture!

I've been retired for nearly seven years now, and haven't really stopped until the last year or so - at last, this is what retirement is really like?

Achievement for the Year

I wrote last January that a written list of tasks can be a bit depressing as it just looks insurmountable and has the opposite effect to what is intended.  I had a realistic list of a few jobs planned for the year, so I thought that I should update my progress (this is also a self test as I haven't already checked!):

a.  Finish the small brick wall and the barbecue stand at the back of the garden - Done
b.  Get some more limestone and finish the wall down the side of the house/lawn - Done apart from the far end
c.  Get some more limestone and do the other end of that wall, where I want to make a ramp up to the lawn with a retaining wall in front of the shed. - Done except the coping
d.  Finish decorating indoors (includes lime plaster repairs) - Done except for painting the repair at the kitchen door
e.  Plaster the walls of the wardrobe - No
f.   Fit the bath panel properly - No
g.  Refurbish at least one of the sash windows - Still not even one!
h.  Construct an 8' x 12' shed in the side garden - Done, and painted
i.   Construct a store (for camping equipment and rarely used tools etc) round the back - Well, I rebuilt the earlier shed for that purpose
j.   Repaint various bits outside where the black paint is peeling off (why?) - No

Other minor jobs here included a new lounge carpet (or was that last year?), finishing the tiling in the kitchen, laying some more turf, cleaning all the secondary glazing.  I also fulfilled the promise to my oldest brother to go and help him do a job on his equally old house for a few days. That involved four days to remove a flat concrete roof built on corrugated iron, mostly using an angle grinder, mallets and bolsters... 

In a sense, that's a lot of work achieved here as we had a £200k job done in the Grade I listed church opposite - fitting a limecrete floor, new boiler and toilets (Whoopee!) - as well as planning for next year's £200k of stonework repairs (thanks to an HLF grant).  Anyone who has ever been churchwarden at the time of having no vicar, and had to take on the treasurer job as well, will understand how busy I have been, even before the fight through the hoops of the CofE and the HLF and at the same time managing a contractor on site.

I should add a brief word on my operation - everyone (including the surgeon - "is it really a year?") thinks that the year since that event has just flown past.  My brother is in excellent health and my old kidney is now helping him to enjoy life as he used to (i.e. pre 2006 or so).  He really does have his life back.  As his daughter said to me: "we have had a good time doing things as a family this year - we had got used to Dad just being asleep every afternoon!"  I too am in excellent health and have had no real issues at all; the nephrectomy was effectively just two days of discomfort followed by a week or so of feeling delicate.  I cannot even say that I had any pain as I just avoided doing certain things for the few weeks, like stretching in an odd direction, or lifting things etc. For the whole story see http://diaryofakidneydonor.blogspot.co.uk/

I have to confess to one downside - although I recovered my strength very well, I do feel that I have lost some stamina and get tired (or fed up) quite easily.  Or is that old age just creeping up more quickly than I would like?

Doesn't Time Fly?

Yesterday was my grandson's third birthday; he was born the day after all that snow fell in Dec 2010.  I can remember so clearly that I was busy the whole day doing the laths on the back bedroom ceilings  - it was freezing cold in the house - while the snow fell and fell until it was 8 or 10 inches deep. I wrote this entry a few days later, but here's another photo from that time:

That one was taken in the back garden of the dreadfully cold and badly designed rented house that we had at the time. That house (built in 1999) just never got warm, even in July, and a modern house surely should not allow the internal hot water pipes to freeze between the boiler and the bathroom! This house of ours, however, did warm up when the walls had dried out after all the sources of dampness had been tackled; the old thick walls are now a heat reservoir which helps the house to be warmer than outside in winter and cooler than outside in summer. Old methods are more effective than badly done new ones!

Anyway, back to my grandson. I did not realise how much fun a grandchild would be, especially now that he has reached the stage of learning things and asking questions. Every time we see him he comes out with some new bit of learning, like switching on the room lights. Of course, I am fairly pleased that he wasn't our own child when we heard about him being unwell last weekend! However, he was better yesterday and really enjoying opening his presents, blowing candles out and eating chocolate cake. Oh to be young again.

Rain, Rain, Rain

I asked the other week why we British always talk about the weather.  Well, after the rain of the last week I think I can now answer the question - it's because the weather is so b****y awful.  April and May were bad enough but I think we all thought that the heatwave at the end of May heralded the start of summer.  Wrong!  I have managed to get a small amount of work done outside, but nowhere near as much as I had hoped.  Right now the rain has eased but it's all muddy underfoot in my garden builder's yard and everywhere is dripping.

What I have achieved is to make a deep concrete plinth (right) on which to mount a cast iron lamp-post, and I've laid a concrete foundation for the wall beside the back gate, together with some block work where the wall itself will be buried in the slope of the garden (no point in burying good faced limestone!).  Although they seem small, these two structures together consumed a whole one tonne bag of ballast!  There is just the small matter of the wall itself to be built, plus 14 yards of foundation and retaining wall for the garden beside the house.

Mind you, I have been very busy on other things in the last ten days.  We had a church 1950's party which had to be held inside as it was so cold (quite apart from the occasional shower) and we've spent some time looking after our dear 17 month grandson.  Firstly we took him (without his parents) to a large family do in London where the sheer numbers could have fazed him, but he survived remarkably well and we returned home as proud grandparents (although we also acknowledge our age and consequent tiredness).  Then we looked after him for a whole day at our house, when he was cheerful, fun and communicative (and we got even more tired!).  He has reached a reasoning point, where he can work out a problem for himself.  For instance, he has been known to push a chair to the kitchen work top so that he can climb up onto the work top!  The other day he stood near our front door and then at me and asked to be picked up.  It then became obvious that he only wanted to be higher so that he (or I) could open the front door as he knew the latch was well out of his reach.

I have also recently received direct from the publishers a copy of a new Haynes Manual called "Period Property - care and repair of old houses".  This was especially good because it was free: it contains some photos of the limecrete floor in this house.  Then the author, Ian Rock, came to see this house as he was so interested by this blog and wanted to see what had been done to the house. [Edit - they now have a website http://www.period-house.com/]

A Genuine Jersey Holiday

It has been a bit quiet here recently.  This is partly due to a general malaise on my part, partly because I have been doing odd little jobs which aren't worth reporting, and most importantly because we have just had a week's holiday in Jersey.  This was our first overseas holiday in almost four years, so it was about time!

Jersey is interesting.  Many buildings are made of granite, and they seem to care more than my local council about the old look of the place, especially away from St Helier.  In consequence, there was a lot of work being done by local builders using granite, although I suspect not with lime mortar.  Actually, since granite is (I think) not porous like limestone, I'm not even sure if lime mortar is as necessary as it is with limestone.  There was also a significant amount of concrete work in evidence, much of it dating from the German occupation in WWII.  They used slave labour to fortify the place against an Allied invasion which must have been a huge drain on their resources; however this was totally wasted as the Allies had not the slightest intention of invading the islands.  One of the still useful legacies is a high sea wall (built to prevent tanks being landed) which goes all the way along the five mile beach at the west of the island.

If you are thinking of going to Jersey (as a tourist rather than occupier!!), I advise you not to go in July or August if you want to drive around.  The roads are small, junctions have poor visibility and parking can be difficult.  I think that the roads and junctions are deliberately never improved as the maximum speed limit is 40mph (and can often be 30 or 20!) and so the road design is effectively a cheap means to regulate traffic; if you have an accident at those speeds, it is probably rare to even injure someone.  The road signs leave something to be desired; they seem to fall between UK and French standards, so often a junction is signed in advance but not at the junction itself.  The parking would have been tiresome in the peak times, but we were able to park quite easily, even in St Helier.  These things were not really a problem in May, but we kept on asking ourselves "what would this be like in August?".

Our visit occurred during the Jersey Food Festival; we spent the only really wet afternoon in a posh hotel watching and tasting cookery demonstrations (and I tasted my first oyster).  A simple food I now love is the boiled Jersey Royal potato - delicious with butter.

One place we visited was Jersey Dairy Ltd - see photo of their new factory right.  They are effectively the only exporter of dairy products from the island.  (My thanks to Eamonn the MD for the tour, the free ice-cream tasting was great!)  One little-known fact is that under current rules the Channel Islands are not protected by labelling regulations, and so if you have a single half breed Jersey cow in your herd anywhere in the UK, you can sell all your milk as "Channel Island milk" or "Jersey milk".  Apparently most supermarkets use this ploy on lots of dairy products to confuse consumers, which seems a bit underhand but is quite legal.  To avoid it you should look for a little logo which says "Genuine Jersey" (and I think there's an equivalent for Guernsey); this logo IS protected and means what it says.  The Jersey cows on the island are registered and protected in order to maintain the purity of the breed, unlike on the mainland here.

By the way, we also visited a farm: the Jersey cows are ever so sweet and friendly!

Age and Forgetfulness

Before I get to the age bit, a quick update: I've done float coat of the lime plaster on the wall in the extension, which I'm pretty pleased with.  It had to be done in two bits as I was unable to find the energy to do the whole thing in one day.  I'll tackle the final coats when I feel up to it!  Compare these photos with the original ones when I started (note the old square hatch in the middle).

It's not all I've done recently, but I have been a bit distracted because of recent events like my birthday, which seemed to last for four days last weekend.  It's not necessarily a great event to celebrate one's birthday.  OK, when you're young, each one is exciting, with presents, a party and possibly some sense of being closer to being a "grown-up".  I'm not sure when this sense of excitement ceased for me, but my latest birthday was, as they say, a BIG one with a zero at the end. My lovely family were wonderful and I had a great time with some great presents (see below).

It is obvious to me that I am getting old - after all, I'm retired!  I partly excuse myself as my early retirement was prompted by redundancy at 58.  I reckon I'm pretty fit - having then spent 17 months refurbishing this house I have become much fitter. I proved this last year when, needing some working trousers, I found an old pair of RAF trousers last worn in 1992, and they fitted!!!  I also have a sweet grandson, but I know some people who were grandparents before they were 40, so having a grandson doesn't make me old, does it?

Nevertheless, I myself find it hard to believe that subtracting year of birth from the current year somehow equals 60.  I've tried checking the arithmetic to make sure I've not miscalculated, but it's still 60.  A good number of friends at church were astonished when sharing some birthday cake last Sunday.  Actually it was two cakes, one a '6' and the other '0'; I cunningly shared out the '6' first, and then asked the latecomers to guess what number had appeared in front of the '0'.  Very gratifying to see the looks of astonishment on some faces who thought that a '5' was more appropriate.

One of the things that I notice about myself is increasing forgetfulness.  Whilst doing something, it is so easy to be asked to do something else, which you then totally forget.  I have developed techniques for coping with this, to make things stick in my memory, but even these are not infallible.  This happened to me the other day, when the rector asked me to give a message to Jane; I was in conversation with a group of friends and I actually replied that I would forget unless I took home something as a reminder of the task.  So then I forgot to take the reminder!

I also forget things like ideas for this blog - something comes into mind whilst plastering or painting, and by the time I am in a position to write it down, it has gone.  If you're lucky, you go back to the same place and somehow the same thoughts come back, but it doesn't always work.

Back to my birthday: the best present was the last one to arrive.  It was a hardbound book of this blog!  Apparently you can get this done at a well known high street chemist.  It is about 10 inches square, and has lots of photos from this blog (plus a few by Jane that I had not seen before), together with a selection of brief quotes (the better ones, probably selected by Suzi) telling the story of what has been done to this house.  What a thing to treasure!  Come the day that the internet crashes or Blogspot disappears, I will still have a wonderful memento.  Beat that, as they say.

More Lime Plastering

Well, I've finished off the scratch coat on that wall, and I'm now waiting for it to go off before I do the float coat.  I'm pretty happy with my efforts (so far) but I must say that the bit around the door was far more difficult than I had expected.  My admiration for Phil the Spread and all other plasterers has increased in direct proportion to the ache in both my arms, specifically the elbow joints.  Both forearms felt as though they were about to fall off after I finished, and I had only done two mixes on each day; how do these guys do five or six?

Anyone who saw me will probably have wondered why that idiot was mixing mortar outside on such a cold day.  Even cement would have been out of the question, so to knock up lime seems idiotic.  I'm well aware of the issues with lime and cold weather (or, for that matter, lime and hot weather!), but I did have a plan.  The mortar was all carefully kept inside so was at about 18 deg C, but I had no intention of using my mixer indoors as you end up with lime splashes over everything within a wide arc in front of the mixer.  These splashes can also be at quite an unexpected range!  My solution was to pre-warm the mixer with a couple of kettles of boiling water, and then cover it up again as soon as the load was in the wheelbarrow.  Once inside, the joy of lime is that it stays workable for as long as you can be bothered, although you do need to knock it up again when the hawk is loaded.

The other real pain is cleaning up afterwards.  The mixer is done first, then the water/sand/lime mix is poured into the wheelbarrow which acts as the sink to do all the tools, leaving the wheelbarrow itself as the last thing.  On a cold day there is a real incentive to all this VERY quickly!  Then, inside to sort out the floor: our black limestone flags look wonderful but you need to clean all the lime mortar off before it sets or you will have a real job on your hands later on.  A decorator's sponge is a good tool, plus a large bowl of warm water and some disposable gloves (which of course I was also wearing for all the plastering).  Then it's wipe and rinse continually for ages.  One thing is always to do complete flags so that cleaning doesn't show.  I used the same method while doing the grouting, but you have to develop a technique for wiping the surplus off the flags right to the edges without leaving any signs of wiping.  I found that a careful sponging along the edge with a gentle turn with the fingers to use a fresh bit of sponge seemed to work very well; the turn twists the sponge from behind and brings it over the mortar which reveals a nice clean edge behind it.  Again, frequent rinsing of the sponge is critical.  I really am longing to have the whole job finished so that perhaps the floors will need cleaning less often!

One reason for the extension taking a long time is of course the weather (and the forecast for Saturday is minus 10 deg C!).  Another reason is that I get tired quite quickly, and have realised that pushing myself too much on one day simply means that I then achieve even less the next day, so a sensible, steady pace is required for maximum achievement.  Thirdly, I have been to see the doctor recently and it took several visits to decide that there was nothing wrong with me apart from advancing years. Finally, of course, there's my grandson to see - when you've got a cute little kid like him to play with, it certainly puts things in perspective and you wonder why you bother doing things at the speed of the modern world.  I spent three hours babysitting one afternoon the other week and it was FUN!

Lethargy Strikes

Well, we just managed to get the plastering finished before Christmas - last Thursday to be exact - so we were right to defer any further work on the extension until the New Year.  The week included another day when no-one turned up, with just a "sorry" by text but no actual reason. Thus the five or six day job took 8.5 days of work, spread over 17 elapsed days.  No wonder the timescales have slipped; I really did want to have a functional extra

A Rest at Christmastime

The plasterer and his mate have been here for four days this week - no explanation as to what happened to Monday - and there's still a couple of days' work left on the extension.  However, the work so far looks very good and I'm very pleased with the finish.  Unfortunately, the delay has meant that there isn't really time to do the plumbing and floor before Christmas - we would have been still doing the floor on Dec 23rd instead of

We're Moving In!

It really seems odd after eight months of work, with numerous contractors and much personal effort, to realise that we can actually move in next week.  It's a sort of end-of-term feeling - relief and deep satisfaction mixed with a kind of hollowness.  Note that I'm NOT saying that the house is finished, merely that things are done sufficiently to allow us to move in (so long as the boiler is commissioned on Monday!).  This pair of photos shows how the public view of the house has changed in the last eight months:

I still have plenty to do as there are many remaining tasks, such as refurbishing the sash windows, finishing the decorating and rebuilding the old "service wing", plus most of the garden/driveway tasks.  For ages I have been giving priority to tasks that get us out of our rented house and into our own place (with no mortgage!).

The last major task was the installation of the newly-made window cill for the new kitchen window.  Chris cast the new cill in cement and did a remarkable job of making a colour which matches the Cotswold stone and pointing.  Although it should have been done before the installation of the window, circumstances dictated otherwise (i.e. Chris broke the first cill, then he broke his foot...)!  It was VERY heavy but it was lifted up by four strong people and slid into place without too much difficulty, leaving me with the task of making good the stonework and pointing around it.  It was a great feeling to realise that this was the last major task and that the house was now effectively finished and secure.  Jane became quite emotional when she saw it - surprising that a cement object could actually be a thing of beauty!
 
The window above used to look like this (below): 

I think that the new wall filling in the bottom of the old door is the thing of which I am most proud of having done with my own hands on this project.

I'm still in progress with my wardrobe which is a major bit of woodwork, and there is still decorating to be done.  However, this week I was helped by Wayne (not Wayne the kitchen fitter, but the brother of Neil the electrician) who has done a sterling job at some of the tasks which I found really tedious like sanding and painting skirting board.

I was visited this week by my son, daughter-in-law and grandson, who last visited only three weeks ago.  Their amazed reaction on seeing what had been accomplished since their last visit has given me a yardstick to show just how busy that time has been.  The list is quite long: front garden cleared, dropped kerb and driveway laid, 30 tons of hardcore cleared, kitchen units, kitchen appliances and two new windows fitted, kitchen floor grouted, bathroom tiled and fitted out, electrics finished, fireplace installed and painted, and lots of decoration done.  Finally, I fitted a net curtain in the new lounge window which made it look as though the house was occupied.

One fundamental thing that is missing at the moment is a toilet seat.  This was an oversight on our part as the soft close type we wanted was about to be introduced when we ordered our bathroom fittings and we forgot to go back in May and order it when it became available.  There's always something that catches you out!

Edit - I'm adding here a few extra photos of the house:

Laying a Limecrete Floor Part 2

This week has seen the completion of a major item on the critical path for us to move in: the slab for the limecrete floor has started to go off very quickly - as I was told that NHL5 would - so we have laid the screed.  Again I had Chris and Shane to help - Chris had done a few floors before (but not in lime), and Shane was expert at mixing (but not lime), so they relied on me for the technical input.  I relied on Mike Wye and the internet!

The screed uses NHL5 and sharp sand, in a 1:2 mix by volume, 75mm thick (as advised by Mike Wye). Be advised that a LOT of sand is needed!  For some reason I have had trouble in calculating the required amounts of sand and NHL5, and we ran out of both during the first day, so stopped with two-thirds completed (see join across the floor in the photo on the right).  I bought some more of everything and we finished the job two days later.  It was much easier to do than the slab, as we had a decent solid base to work on, and Chris now loves to work with lime.

Chris is a bit of a perfectionist and was slightly upset with the need for a join; he was then even more upset to discover that the last half tonne of sand was from a different supplier and so was a darker colour (although you can't see it in the photo).

This is me not Chris as I deleted the photo of him by accident

He was not comforted by my reminder that we are laying flagstones on top and so neither the colour change or the join will be seen.


The sand situation was not helped by my general lack of understanding about volumes and weights of sand.  I suppose I should not have been surprised as, after all, I knew how much stuff had come out of the ground in the kitchen.  We ended up using just over three tonnes for a 21 sq metre floor.  As I expected to use less than two tonnes, I had a one tonne bulk bag of sand delivered, and supplemented this with repeated visits to a local DIY store to buy their loss-leading bagged sand at £1.07 for a 25kg bag (in a quantity of ten or more).  The result of using more than three tonnes was that I made a lot of unexpected visits, and they ran out!

So far as I can tell, our floor must be thicker than designed - perhaps the slab sank a bit on the loose lay LECA?  We laid the screed up to a fixed level (as opposed to laying a specific depth), so it might have been deeper in places without us noticing.  Otherwise I do not see where all the mix went went.  The floor area is 21 sq metres and I was told I would need 21 bags of NHL5 (i.e. one per sq metre); we had four bags left from the slab (why?) so that made 25 to start with, and yet we ended up needing 30 altogether - so each mix only did 0.7 sq metre.

For the technically minded, we used a large diesel drum mixer on hire as we realized that my own mixer was too small - we would have been doing twice as many mixes!  In truth, the hired mixer was also too small, as it took 30 mixes to do the screed; if you overload it then it won't mix properly.  Each mix comprised one 25 kg bag of NHL5 (30-35 litres) and four and a half 25 kg bags of sharp sand (about 70 litres), and used about 15 litres of water.  Other people recommend a pan mixer for better mixing - we did not experience much balling, having followed the mixing method recommended by the manufacturers (although there was more balling with the LECA - see Part 1 - and we did have to stop it and scrape the mixture off the interior, which was tedious).    One unexpected issue was that my wheelbarrow is now on its last legs - two welds have broken and the sides have bowed out.

Then it was the weekend so I went to see my grandson:

Proud Grandad with sleeping grandson

This blog entry was late in being uploaded for various reasons such as tiredness.

Happy New Year

A Happy New Year to all my readers. I am really surprised by the number of readers recorded, and the amazing variety of countries represented from all round the world. Please feel free to recommend this blog to any friends who might be interested in this sort of thing, and also to make comments against any entry (especially if I've said something silly or missed a horrendous typo!)


Christmas Presents

Not only do I have a "contractor's wheelbarrow" (see earlier), I have now bought myself (as a personal Christmas present, because Santa didn't) a proper pair of working boots with steel toecaps.  They are very comfortable, although I note sadly that they were made in China, like most things these days.

However, I did get a few books for Christmas and some tools, like a new spirit level and a plumb bob.  The books included not one but two copies of a really useful book called "The Old House Handbook" (Roger Hunt and Marianne Suhr, published by SPAB).  My two children obviously know the sort of thing that I like now - it's just a shame they don't talk more often!

Fun with the local District Council

I put in claim for exemption from Council Tax on the grounds that the house is uninhabitable.  They quickly sent me a bill showing that I owed them nothing for this financial year; however, they soon followed that up with a request for documentary proof of the uninhabitable status, such as a contractor's estimate or surveyor's report.  Having neither of these, I sent them a set of 22 assorted photos by e-mail and have heard nothing back yet...

In October I submitted the required (being in a Conservation Area) "Notice of Intent" to cut down the 24 cm diameter pear tree which grows very close to the side of the house (there is just a 10 cm gap).  They replied, saying that they had six weeks to object and, if I heard nothing by Dec 1st, I could go ahead.  On Dec 3rd, I received a letter dated Dec 2nd which formally granted me consent to fell this tree.  Of course, by Dec 2nd the tree was a 5 metre high stump, with all four branches on the ground!

"Hey Big Spender"


Before Christmas I promised the answer to why I found myself humming Shirley Bassey's "Hey Big Spender" whilst doing laths in the bedroom ceilings. Think of the words which go something like (from memory):

"Would you like to have fun, fun, fun?
How about a few laffs, laffs, laffs?
We'll be having a good time!"

Personally I don't regard doing lath repairs as a good time, and can't see how anyone else would either.

Snow, snow, snow

I wrote last week's entry on Friday night; had I waited until Saturday, it would have read slightly differently.  Whilst doing yet more laths on Saturday (to be ready for the plasterer on Tuesday), it was steadily snowing outside.  By lunchtime it was about four inches, and by the time my arms were dropping off (if you've ever done laths you must know what I mean!) it was nearer eight inches (see photo right).  I had serious doubts about being able to drive even just the one mile back home.  I accomplished that safely, but found that on a new-ish housing estate (where we are currently renting), the local council does NOTHING about snow/ice gritting etc on roads, far less pavements.  As I drove into the estate, the roads became steadily worse until I gratefully reached the 20cm virgin snow in our cul-de-sac.

Of course, this had obvious implications for my project management plans for the week: basically, nothing has happened.  The carefully laid plans for the collection of our rooflight, the fitment of the rooflight and the finishing of the roof around it, the finishing of replacing laths on two bedroom ceilings, plastering of those two ceilings, and the removal of the scaffolding - NOTHING.  Apart from the snow, it really has been very cold, with minus 11 deg C one morning this week, when the hot water system in our 10-year old rented house froze!

The good news was that our first grandchild was safely born (early) on Sunday evening, and the snow did not prevent us from driving to visit on both Monday and Tuesday.  So, work is suspended whilst we attend to more important issues in life, like supporting our son and daughter-in-law with their new responsibilities, and celebrating Christmas with our daughter plus partner, who arrived here today.