Personally, I work better with deadlines. The latest deadline is a visit from my family to help clear some of the front garden. In order to offer some comfort we want to get the lounge finished. It didn’t seem too much of a challenge when we first set it…

I started by filling the holes in the ceiling, leftover from installing the steel straps. We’d been putting off the repairs for ages as we weren’t sure how best to go about replacing the plaster and lath. In the end we decided just to screw plasterboard to the ceiling and plaster over, we may well find that was a mistake.

Chris then grouted between the glass blocks.

Ta da! I finally got the paint the walls. I should probably have waited till the ceiling was done, but I figured it didn’t matter too much as it’s only the first coat.

We’d ummed and ahhed for a long time about whether to strip the beams. I don’t like painted beams, as wood is so much nicer left exposed, but stripping is a painful job. But now the colours on the walls, I think the beams don’t look too bad, so we’ll be leaving them as they are and saving ourselves a job.

Next we needed to empty the room, ready for leveling the floor. This included taking apart the understairs cupboard. It feels like this is the one last reminent of what the house was, cleared away to make space for the new.

Finally the floor was washed and levelled, a job Chris got on with while I was out at my volunteer day.

His other job while I was out, was installing lights in the bathroom, which feels like luxury after weeks of washing in the gloom.

Next came the filling, with Chris plastering the holes in the ceiling, while I tackled the holes in the walls.

For the first time in what feels like a long-time we’ve acquired a helper.

Chris’s cousin Jude was looking for some work over his summer holidays and offered to come do a few days for us while he was free. He did his first day’s labouring and finished off plastering the tall stairway wall, which has been a job that’s kept slipping down the to-do list. We’ve decided to leave it with a relatively rough finish, both for a textured look and to avoid driving ourselves mad smoothing it out.

While Jude tackled the mammoth wall, and I busied myself giving some previous plastering a first coat, Chris stepped into the magic cupboard and continued the annoying fiddly tiling. That’s the problem with a big fancy shower, it takes an age to finish tiling.