The contractors have returned, and finished nearly all of the window reveals. Though they take up a relatively small area within a room, it’s amazing how much more it makes the rooms look finished. One of our requests to them was that they put our curved corners back, and we were delighted to see they are starting to smooth out the corners of the plasterboard to make a curve.

Chris spent an evening building the remaining piece of wall for the showerroom, meaning all our studwalls are in place now.

With the house valuer now booked in to return, we wanted to make the house look as finished as possible. I therefore continued with plastering, starting on the doorway between the kitchen and the lounge.

the

Chris spent some time putting back in a plug socket in the bedroom closet. He’d asked the electrician to remove this, as he thought we didn’t need it, but then remembered this was where the broadband was going to be wired in.

Feeling like they were having too much fun in their spare time, my mum and dad came up for the Saturday to lend a hand.

I got mum helping me with the old wooden ceilings. First we had to paint all the screws with an oil-based paint in order to prevent them from rusting. Next we started filling all the holes with wood filler.

Finally the ceiling had a quick sand and then a paint. It needs another couple of coats, but I already feel justified in my previous insistence that the old, recycled ceilings would look nice when painted.

In the meantime dad helped Chris to move all the tools and other items out of the three rooms that needed the floors sanding.

Nails then had to be banged back into the floor, and everything swept and hoovered. We’d hired an edge sander, and a larger floor sander. Dad got to work on the edges, while Chris began sanding the main floor.

Both of the two bedrooms came up really nicely. We aren’t too bothered about sanding everything off, as the darker areas create a nice texture… plus it would take forever.

Chris had a go at sanding the bathroom, but the paint was so thick it gunked up the sandpaper within seconds. Instead, we brought some paint stripper and tried to scrap the worst off. Once washed and dried I gave it another go. It took an absolute ages, and I constantly had to change the paper, but in the end the worst came off.

Spending another night at the house, we decided to build the old wooden bed we’d found in the house when originally selling off things that had been left behind. Chris had been keen to keep the bed, but when we put it together we realised it was actually a superking, far too big for us to use. So onto Marketplace it goes, for someone else to enjoy.

Having to take the day off to meet the valuer and broadband installer, Chris spent a bit of time filling in the gaps around the glass bricks, and plastering.

Thankfully the valuer agreed that our house was worth the value of our mortgage, so this has now been transfered. With that done we’ve set the moving day as the 27th June, so two weeks time. Currently, our evenings are spent packing up our old house, but with only half a room plastered, we’ll be spending the coming weekend trying to get some more rooms ready to move in to. We’ve decided to try and unpack as little as possible once we move in, living out of one room, till the others are more habitatable. It’s not very appealing leaving our comfortable and dust-free home for a building site, but it’ll be nice to have the sale done, and be able to work on the house without a long commute to eat up our time. Lots of positives… but also lots and lots of dust.