This week I’ve been planting 100 tulip bulbs. We planted some tulips in our old garden but they never really had enough impact, so this time I’m going big.

Inside, Chris has installed a hand towel rail and door handle, both a little bit vintage. The door handle came from the house, but the towel rail I brought secondhand.

In the kitchen, Chris lined up the ceiling ventilation from the showerroom above. This was possible the trickiest vent to install as it had to avoid all the pipework and wires located in this piece of ceiling. One down, a fair few to go.

Rather than cut up a larger door I cut down the old over the stairs door to fit our cupboard. Still a bit of fiddling around to do before it looks less like a franken-cupboard.

On the landing it took four coats of paint to get the ceiling looking a little less tatty.

My big job for the weekend was prepping and staining the kitchen beams. It doesn’t sound like a lot but having sanded and cleaned all the beams and stained half, my legs, shoulders and arms are all worn out and full of aches. From constantly reaching above you, and getting up and down the stepladder, it’s like a full day aerobics class. Chris, looking at my newly stained beams, stated confidently ‘they’ll definitely need a second coat’…

Chris didn’t have a particularly easy time of it either, finishing off clearing out the old mortar on the kitchen wall and repointing it. My mum had started this job, and after she left I thought I should finish it off, however the mortar has to be the toughest in the whole house. It was truly wrist breaking work. Since then I’ve been putting off getting back to it, so I was pretty happy when Chris decided to take on this exhausting job.

Although the sinkhole in the garden was filled during the drainage work, the end of the sinkhole next to the road has been expanding. Having informed the council and been told it wasn’t of concern, we thought we’d better sort it ourselves. Being all out of building waste Chris started throwing in a load of our bricks. It’s a shame to chuck perfectly good bricks into a hole in the ground, but we don’t need them and there’s been little interest on marketplace. And at least they’ll stop the car falling into a pit in the ground.

Having hired the grinding and polishing machine for the kitchen floor for our Christmas break, there’s now a push to get the kitchen ready before the floor work can start. So it certainly feels like we need to work particularly hard on the run up to Christmas, but it’ll be worth it to come out the other side with the kitchen much closer to being done.

Because of this push we haven’t had much of a chance to get Christmassy. However, I took a bit of time to make a wreath for the door, with all the materials gathered from the garden (apart from the oranges). Phew at least that’s a little bit of Christmas spirit. Nadolig llawen as the Welsh would say.