We only had one day free this weekend for DIY, so I made an effort to get through a few small jobs in the evenings.

I gave the lounge beams a final coat of paint, before washing the brushes, putting everything away, and then remembering the one solitary beam in the utility that still needed painting.

When we first moved in we left Idris alone for one of his first evenings without us and he decided he’d burrow his way out through the door. Luckily he now feels more comfortable in the house on his own, so it seemed time to undo the damage. I used a chisel to smooth out the worst of the roughness, then sanded it down before adding a coat of stain to the bare wood. The whole door then got another coat, and the frame a couple of layers of the brown paint.

Where the edge of the concrete floor meets the door, there’s a ugly gap, which needed a piece of trim to cover it. I cut it to size, primed and paint it, and stuck it down. It’s a very small change but it’s surprising how much its changed the room.

I having previously started the skirting in the kitchen I had to stop as the new doors weren’t in. I restarted, but remembered how complicated the tiny bit of remaining skirting was going to be – as the lack of space beside the door means they’ll have to be trimmed down. I managed one piece and moved on to something simpler.

I continued with the boiler doors, building them in the same vein as the previous door. The only added complication was that the frame needed a bit of additional support, which meant using expandy foam to stick pieces of wood to the wall to screw the boards to. Still all done now, just in need of hinges to finish the job.

Chris’s big job for the weekend was finally connecting up the extractor fan, which was a fiddly task, involving cutting holes through the cupboard and getting all the electrics connected up. Chris was triumphant to finally put the fan on and see it drawing in the steam. The only negative is that he got his electric wires mixed up and now you press the ‘-‘ to turn the extractor up and ‘+’ to turn it down…

We’d spent out Saturday morning cleaning the layers of dust ready for visitors, only to have new layers laid down after our day of DIY on Sunday. A never ending cycle of dust and dusting. At least it’s slightly less dust with each passing cycle.