Three days of DIY is a rare opportunity, and I must admit I felt optimistic that we would get a huge amount done. Yet the weekend seemed to pass with not much accomplished, and a sense of frustration. Yet, writing this blog post I realised we’d gotten plenty done, it was just all fiddly little things, that don’t seem particularly satisfying. Still they need to be done, and quickly.

My first job of the weekend was to plaster the brick wall above the small steel with concrete mortar. This will help to give the slightly unstable bricks a bit more stability. What the task made me realise is that I’m no good at plastering. Luckily we only have loads and loads of plastering to do…

One thing I really wanted that I wasn’t allowed, was to leave the steels exposed. I like seeing the bones of a building and I think they’re quite sculptural. But apparently all steels need to be covered in fire-resistant plasterboard. This is to protect them from a fire… but they’re made of steel, and all our other beams are wood… and the wooden beams don’t need to be protected…

We started building the stud wall around the shower room. The space feels very small at the moment, but that’s probably just because we’ve grown used to it being open. In order to attach the wall to the ceiling we had to attach the plaster membrane first, ready for when we plasterboard it. I’ve forgotten what a painful and annoying job this is.

We then did some more boarding of various stud walls. Some bits still need to be left open to sort pipes and electrics, but there’s a lot of completed walls now.

Chris spent a lot of the weekend fiddling around with plumbing, including getting the waste pipes in place, running water pipes, and installing an outside tap.

While Chris was busy with water pipes I built my first doorway. Annoyingly we’d completely unnecessarily taken down this doorway when we thought we would need to move the wall to widen the stairs. Sometimes you create your own DIY.

A particular highlight of the weekend was finally selling our massive pile of doors. Having gone through and chosen all the doors we wanted to keep, we then sold a total of 7 full-sized doors and three small doors. Having laboriously lugged the doors from one room to another throughout the renovation it was great to see the back of them.

Since starting the renovation we’ve been bringing Idris with us. Usually he sleeps in the car between coming out for tea breaks and a walk, but with the weather warming up he had to spend a day hanging out in the house. It’s amazing where he can make himself comfortable.

Having already brought our kitchen sink we managed to get a brand new tap for £15 off someone who had ordered the wrong colour and failed to return it.

And finally in the garden I spotted some sweet cecily appearing. I’m not sure if it’s wild or planted, but a lovely addition to the garden.

With a final scurry to the recycling center with a car full of rubbish we’ve hopefully left the house ready for the return of the insulators and the arrival of the plasterers this week. Having the walls plastered will feel like the beginning of the end, though perhaps the last quarter of a marathon rather than the last few feet of a sprint.

Excitingly we made our first electricity this week too. Our final tally on Monday being 20kw. Not sure what that means, but certainly sounds impressive.