Weekend plans, plus a touch of winter sickness, have made it a relatively slow week. Even when we have got going, the fiddly nature of the jobs has made progress feel particularly sloth-like.

We’ve been borrowing a chop-saw from one of Chris’s brothers, but as we need it for quite a while, and he has his own jobs to be getting on with, we thought we might as well buy one second-hand and sell it on later.

This has meant I can get on with the various bits of skirting and architrave that needed doing across a number of rooms.

Chris has finally finished laying and grouting the utility floor, aside from the few by the door that needs replacing. Now we just need to add a wooden step to complete the look.

In the bedroom we finally installed a curtain. The curtain itself is second-hand, but I struggled to find a large enough wooden curtain pole nearby, so that ended up being new. Although the room is never particularly cold, you can now feel the temperature difference between the curtain and the window when they’re closed.

In the kitchen Chris has been getting on with all the various bits of edge beading, as we offered to get it done for the plasterer, to avoid him wasting time on it.

I spent a good few evenings repainting the bathroom door, as dark green isn’t the easiest thing to cover.

We’ve been battling over the flooring in the lounge for a long time, as Chris wanted hard flooring and I wanted carpet, but we may have found a compromise in a cork flooring, which isn’t as cold as tile or wood, and has good sound absorption qualities.

I was disproportionately pleased with myself for reusing the cork samples to create bases for some of our old bathroom tile samples, in order to repurpose them as coasters. I feel I could have made many more, but Chris pointed out there’s only so many coasters the two of us need.