Wisteria in the alley

Another flower-centric weekend. The wisteria in the alley has bloomed:

And I came home on Friday night to find the vacant shop across from my flat has turned into a florist! Super-pleased. I bought some flowers to celebrate.

Although it's been beautifully sunny, I've spent most of the weekend inside, stripping paint from the kitchen window. I worked from 10pm to 1:30am last night and from 11am to 4pm today and only have the central strip to show for my efforts (although it is the most fiddly part, because of the metal). It's not even perfectly finished, as this photo shows. Such hard work - I was already grateful for my parents' work on my bedroom but I now really understand how much my Dad had to do to get such a good finish on the bedroom window.
Oh, and it seems I'm doomed with shelving. I screwed the shelves to the brackets, did some polyfilla-ing and painting to cover the screwheads, and loaded them up with books... to find that I'd forgotten to take account of the added height of the books when working out where to position the shelves on the wall so they look a bit too high now. :(

Shamefree shelving

I managed to borrow an extension lead from work so I put up my shelves this afternoon. I had a day off (my old school friend was over for the weekend and left this afternoon) - holy smoke but it felt good to have a three-day weekend, especially because I had a few sleepless nights last week, finding myself hopping out of bed in the middle of the night to check that my wall wasn't collapsing... hem.
I need to buy some little wood screws to attach the shelves to the brackets before I load them up, and I also want to cover and paint the screws, but the hard bit's out of the way. They're nothing special but I'm pleased.

Baby steps

I had a friend staying last weekend as well, but I managed to get a pair of shelves primed and painted only to come up against my lack of an extension cord. I only have three proper sockets in the flat. I can plug in lamps and chargers and the like in all of the sockets, but to plug in "large" items like computer, radiator, hairdryer, iron or drill, I need to rely on the biggies, of which two are in the kitchen. So really, I have to rely on the single proper socket in the hall, which permanently has a little multi-socket extension cord in it for computer, radiator, etc. And damn but that little extension cord is MILES away from being able to reach my bedroom windows. A couple of friends brought round four metres of cord to allow me to put up my curtain rod, but I'm now stuck for cord to put up my shelves. Not urgent, but a little frustrating. Vivement new electricity!

So, shelves almost done. Other priming news concerned this little chair, which I found beside the rubbish bins a couple of nights after I moved in here (it doesn't really show in the picture but it was a pretty nasty yellowish colour):
- which now looks like this, ready for a coat of proper paint:

- and I primed the new bits of my DIY'd bathroom door.
I've also finished oiling my bedroom windows and have sorted out curtain rings for one side of the window - I miscalculated so I need to buy more rings for the other side. I think that's all for this weekend. Baby steps indeed. :)

Paint chipping

Late nights at work again all last week so I didn't get back to my bedroom until Friday night. As I waited for the kettle to boil for my hot water bottle (yeah, very hot, but I don't have proper heating and I love my repurposed Sigg - stays warm 'til morning!), I went in to take a look at what I'd done last weekend and started idly picking at a loose bit of paint on the hall side of the door. Bad move - an hour later, I was still there, surrounded by paint chips but at least I'd done a whole side. Nothing more addictive than picking, especially when whatever it is comes off in satisfyingly large pieces.

I know that this is NOT an effective way to strip paint but I'd started, so I ended up spending the weekend finishing that side of the door. Of course, I enlisted the support of my trusty scraper and my trusty penknife but it was still a slow job. In the process, I discovered that the clumpy layers of white paint hide semi-clumpy green paint and that two of the windows have been broken and replaced at some point so the molding is just a rough approximation of quarter-diameter dowling. I was rather relieved to discover that actually, as I'd got down to the wood in a couple of places and was wondering if I'd be morally obliged to strip all the doors and panels in the apartment back to basics to show off the wood.

This is how things stand tonight:
Next steps: find a way to take the paint off the handles and bring on the chemicals for the windows and the other door - enough of this penknife nonsense!

Dust

Having de-poussièred my house last Sunday night and spent a whole week of evenings breathing fresh air, I got stuck in with the sandpaper again today.


This morning, I shunted all of my furniture into my sitting room in preparation for a blitz. My parents are coming over in a few weeks - partly for a holiday, partly to wield paint-brushes - and even though I know they'd be happy to do it, I don't want to land them with all the preparation. So I got out my steps and my sandpaper, put on my work clothes, plugged the gaps under the bedroom doors in a (failed) attempt to keep the dust from getting out, and set to.

The lazy bugger was who sloshed white emulsion all over this flat at some point in the last twenty years deserves to be shot. I spent four hours just on the glass door and I didn't even finish there were so many slobbery drips and runs and lumps (how do you even make lumps when you're painting?). There's paint on the glass and paint on the door handles and the detail of the molding is obscured by... paint. Yeech. Oh, and he had a go at the cornice too.

It's really strange powdery, chalky paint which is pretty difficult to clean up so I'll see if I do anything this week during the evening or if I just have another blitz next weekend when I have enough time to make real headway and justify the cleaning up time. In the meantime, I'm all cosy in my sitting room. Slightly crowded, it must be said, but it'll be nice to wake up in here for a change.