A marathon weekend of painting (and running)

Evening jobs and the long weekend means we’ve managed to make a bit more progress than normal. The two laundries are taking shape after we had a massive push to get as much of the painting done in the new barn before the electricians are back on site this coming week. We finished the ceilings in the garage and laundries in the weekday evenings – which are the last ceilings to paint until the next phase when we start work on another cottage. And during what felt like a marathon weekend of painting, I edged and rolled the walls – pausing on Friday when I ran out of paint. Thank goodness for Amazon Prime – it meant that while John was in Edinburgh actually running the marathon (almost a personal best at 3hrs 28minutes, a pretty good effort!!) I didn’t have to lose time driving round to find more paint. During the week our builders added the keypad locks on the external doors for the laundries and garage, so once I’d also finished touching up the garage walls, we could close the doors on the downstair rooms ready for our electricians to do the ‘second fix’.

I spent Friday evening caulking round the skirting board in the games room, ready for painting. Our builders hung the light beam in the games room during the week – when we moved we found two old beams that we think were originally used in the shippon hayloft; one is now hanging in our new lounge and the second one is in the games room. It just needs to be raised and then the electricians will put the lights on for us to arrange. I also edged two of the walls over the weekend – we’re going with a two-tone colour scheme in there but will see what the first walls look like before choosing the second one! It looks pretty dire at the moment so photos will follow once we get another coat on.

And with our aim to finish our new house asap and move in by late June, we spent Thursday night before John left for Edinburgh hanging the bedroom and bathroom doors which were taking up space in the corridor. I then painted the first coat on the skirting boards in the corridor, living area and bathroom over the weekend (having done the architraves and bedrooms previously). As I was working round the house, I kept noticing extra ‘tidying up’ bits our builders have added and that need caulking – it’s great to see these additions but slightly annoying that I can’t cross ‘caulking’ off the job list yet! 

Our builders have continued to work through the remaining jobs and prep the yard for new concrete, which is due to start any day now. They installed the external ’surround’ around our ‘picture window’ in the lounge – because the window is set back into the wall (which is made from breeze blocks but faced with stone) you could see the breeze blocks around the edge. The metal surround covers the breeze blocks and matches the green on the window frame and looks perfect. Our builders have also done more prep work to the area behind our new house and the three-bed – spreading another delivery of soil, then clearing the area to be concreted and laying stone to create a hard bed to lay the concrete on. They’ve put the shuttering in place for the external dog/boot shower outside the laundry and for the ramp outside the three-bed barn. And they’ve also dug the trenches to bury the EV charge point cables from the buildings out to the other side of the yard where we’ll create parking spaces.

Our various sagas with the utility companies continues. This week Openreach finished installing the fibre connection into our new home – frustratingly it looks like the engineer didn’t keep to the temporary carpet and we now have red mud on the carpet. We didn’t think to put a plug socket next to where the connection comes into the house, so we have a trailing wire across the carpet which we’ll need to hide with furniture. It’s definitely not a major issue but the sort of thing we wish we’d thought about given the room was designed from scratch.

And our electricity company failed to send the right engineer to fit our three-phase supply for the three-bed and the communal building for the third time, which has put us back yet another two weeks and will limit how much our electricians can get done this week. We’ve now had to try another route to get this fixed – apparently the phrase ‘third time lucky’ doesn’t include electricity companies! It’s crazy how difficult the entire process has been to get solar and heat pumps installed and the electricity supply right-sized for them. Especially when you think the alternative would have been to install oil boilers – surely going down the path of renewable technology should be so much easier nowadays.

We managed to make a bit of progress in the garden too – which is still generally looking forlorn and unloved. We sowed some root vegetable seeds in the vegetable beds, potted up a few more seedlings from the conservatory and planted out the sweetcorn and some of our squash seedlings, although one has already been broken off by wildlife. And we finally started weeding the rhubarb patch which has really suffered in the rain. The same is true of the peach tree. We took the winter covers off the peach and nectarine trees – the polythene covers are supposed to prevent peach leaf curl which is a damaging fungal disease – but our peach tree has it. We think the disease was dormant in the previous dead tree that we dug out from the same area when we moved in. It’s also spread to the redcurrant and raspberry bushes next to it so we need to fix it somehow. The wet spring really hasn’t helped the kitchen garden at all.