Chris has gotten the hang of online auctions and managed to buy a Victorian drop arm sofa for the kitchen. Though we’d already bought a small white sofa, Chris was worried this was still too big for the room, so found something more compact. It will need recovering and restuffing but at a cost of £60 we can afford the reupholstery costs. Idris has already claimed his spot. We didn’t know what a drop arm sofa was, but it means that a mechanism allows the arms to be lowered or raised depending on preference.

I spent a fair few evenings redistributing some of the items in the spare room, which does mean there are now boxes scattered around the house waiting to be unpacked, but it freed up some room to work in the crowded space.

Once the room was a little less busy, I sanded down the plaster and smoothed the rounded window corners, before refilling any holes. Once smoothed and filled I gave the two plaster walls a watery coat of paint. The third wall is one of the only in the house that never had the original plaster removed and the fourth wall is still missing some plasterboard and needs plastering.

Next I filled the gaps between the boards on the ceiling with chaulk, a job that took a great deal of gymnastics as I manuevered around the various obstacles in the room. The flat portion of the ceiling remains to be done but as these boards were never taken down the gaps are less significant and don’t need as much filling.

With the chaulking done for now I started on the coving, not an easy job with all the various angles. I kept going as long as I could before my brain was fried.

In the meantime Chris was busy in the attic creating a platform by installing wooden beams between the two steel purlins. With boards placed on top we were able to clear more out of the spare room, with Christmas decorations, camping equipment and other lesser used items getting safely stored away.

On the Sunday I had to go attend a maternity leaving do, and therefore left Chris in charge of himself, meaning I don’t have any photos of work in progress.

His first job was to install another doorway ready for the spare bedroom door.

In the study, he cut out a template for the desk, to avoid wasting the oak worktop. The table is particularly complex because the two walls slope outwards towards the corner, making marking it out in place tricky.

But his biggest achievement was installing the hob and connecting up the electrics for the oven. Meaning that when I got back he was busy cooking a lasagne for the first time in months.

Despite good progress this weekend it’s going to be a fair few evenings working this week to get things ready for another visit next weekend. Having offered to put up Chris’s friend, his wife and their two kids, we’ve got a lot of tidying to do, as well as a fair bit left to get the guest bedroom ready. Not that it’ll be finished, but at the very least we need to get a bed into it…