In our last house I spent an absolute age sanding decades of paint off a salvaged door. With four doors to get back to wood I thought I’d try the paint stripper we used on the floor to see if this might do the job a little quicker.

We decided to strip back the landing side of the upstairs doors, which are currently all dark green. The inside we’ll paint white, as the rooms are brightly coloured and a busy door might make everything feel a bit much.

In the end I applied four coats of stripper, with an hour between each coat. It worked well, with layers of green, grey and brown paint coming off easily with the scrapper. Finally, I let it dry and gave the door a quick sand. One down, three to go.

In the lounge I painted the bookcase cream. Chris hadn’t seen why it needed to be cream rather than white, as we had white paint but had to buy cream. But with the red walls white was too harsh, the cream is much mellower. With that done we’re finally able to unpack some of our books.

In the kitchen I got to work taking the corners off the plasterboard, so the plasterer can give us nice rounded ends to the walls. It would have been nice to go for even more dramatic curves, but without very fancy plastboarding I don’t know how we could have achieved it.

The final bit of ceiling plasterboard also went up in the kitchen, meaning we’re now ready for the plasterer to do his thing.

With the kitchen plastering not far away, I’ve started thinking about colours. I quite liked the idea of a kind of turquoise, and got a range of sample pots, only to find they were almost the same colour once on the wall…

In order the clear out the kitchen a little more we decided to put up the plasterboard ceiling in the showerroom. First I put up wooden planks for the board to attach to. Trying to locate the rafters to screw in to reminded me what a pain doing the ceilings had been.

With the showerroom ceiling up we loaded the remaining plasterboard into the car to take to the recycling center. We’d been holding onto loose ends here and there but we can now safely say we’ve used what we can.

Last minute, Chris had a flash of inspiration for a few scraps of insulated plasterboard, and used them to cover the pipes and machinery for the underfloor heating. With that in place he cut out the back of the cupboard so it could sit more comfortably against the wall.

He then mortared the bricks in place for the step into the utility.

Storm Babet hit us hard, with heavy rain falling almost continuously all night and all day. We knew we had drainage issues, but this was the first time they really made themselves felt. Water streamed down from the wall at the back of the house, as it drained down from the field above. Our neighbour came to ask if we could fill some sand bags to protect her house, as the water was backfilling our drains and running down to her house. Chris dug a channel and the water rushed past the side our house, ankle deep.

In the end we all survived without the water finding its way in, but it made it clear that the drainage needs sorting sooner rather than later.

The starting point for us is to fill in the sinkhole, which the water will be piped through. The land has sunken down around the sinkhole significantly more, so Chris decided we should put our remaining uncleaned bricks down it. Though we could have sold them, they likely wouldn’t have been worth much, and it’s more important the sinkhole is stabilised.

We had time for a couple of trips to the recycling center, taking a stack of rubbish from the house, and the remaining bags of garden waste. With the big bags now gone I was able to plant the last few pots from the garden center, as well as move in some of the plants we’d brought from our old garden. I’d also been saving a birthday card made of paper impregnated with wildflowers seeds, so I added that to the wildflower area for good measure.

The storm has now passed, and the roads that became rivers are roads once again. It’s been very cathartic to have a good clear out, and exciting to think the kitchen is one contractor’s presence away from being fully plastered. Of course after plastering we’ve got the dusty work of grinding down the kitchen floor, which will make the house feel like a bombsite once again, but at the same time after that we’ll not be far away from a finished kitchen! Finger’s crossed our concrete pouring is up to the job.