Trying not to make a mountain out of a molehill…

Thanks to some extra painting time put in by John during the week, we’ve managed to make some real progress again this weekend (at last!). Despite more drips on the bathroom woodwork, we managed to get it pretty much finished, with just a couple of small touches to finish. We wanted it to have a coastal feeling as we’re only half an hour from the sea, so we’ve decorated with driftwood and a lovely Tabitha May picture of Lyme Regis. We’ve also stripped back the beam and matched the paint to the tiles – the original white just felt a bit too clinical to be relaxing. 

We’ve also finished the walls and ceiling in the ensuite – again taking it away from the original white to a grey-blue that’s closer to the colour of the tiles. Hopefully we can get the woodwork done over the bank holiday weekend to finish that room off; it’s not until you have to take a room apart and paint that you realise just how fiddly these small rooms are! 

The other win this weekend was switching out an ancient (and very badly rusted) plug socket back box – a job we were dreading but was actually pretty easy, given it collapsed in our hands! One of the important jobs this summer will be to thin the magnolia that’s against the exterior wall to allow more air to circulate and dry the wall out – the back box was incredibly old but even so, it shouldn’t have rusted that much! 

We made a small step forward with planning as well. After the Planning Officer expressed some concerns about our plans, we’ve been working with our architects and planning consultants to redesign the shippon to reduce down the extensions (and desperately hoping we can keep the plan for two buildings). We submitted the revised designs this week and are just waiting for a response from the planning office now. 

The mole saga continues too… as we were warned by many of you! We just can’t bring ourselves to put down mole traps so tried another approach – filling up the top tunnels with water to encourage him to move on. Although the severe dry weather may mean we just end up watering the lawn! I guess only time will tell…