With guests coming to stay soon, I wanted to tidy up the last few bits in the guest bedroom. This meant filling and sanding a few areas, and then painting the window reveals and coving.

I bought a second curtain and put up the curtain pole on the second window. Because of the wonkiness of walls and ceiling, the curtain pole looks all askew, but it’s actually the only straight element.

Having covered the lintle in the study, I added the coving and filled, sanded and painted around it. The coving around the windows has been a painful job, with the odd angles and wonky walls making it difficult to line up. I’m glad to have the last one done.

In the kitchen I painted the bare plaster with a watery paint mix before painting the section blue. Soon the whole kitchen will need a second coat but at least it looks passable for now.

In the utility I covered the very old and unattractive lintle with plasterboard and filled the gaps. Another bit of plasterboard will need to fill the gaps above the door but first we’ll need to add architrave.

In the downstairs toilet I started to build the boxing around the pipes. The verticle soil pipe we’ve decided will be covered in expandy foam, filled and painted, as we can’t see a reasonable way to box it in. At least the horizontal pipes were a fairly easy job.

One small but satisfying job was to start organising the shed, so all the wood that’s been sitting around in piles in the house could be moved into it. We’ll need to install the windows and door before we can start moving the tools in, but getting the wood out of the house is a nice first step.

Chris focused his attention on finishing the electrics for the extractor fan in the kitchen and adding edging to the bookcase.

He also did the fiddly job of lowering the kitchen lights. We hadn’t had enough cable when we originally installed them so they’d ended up close to the ceiling. They’re much more of a feature now.

The next job that really needed to be finished was the skirting in the kitchen, but its a horrible job and both myself and Chris had been trying to avoid it in the hope the other person would do it. In the end I caved in. I’d avoided it in part because all the skirting upstairs had been a nightmare to attach, but actually this lot went on without a problem. Having filled the gaps the next job will be sanding and painting.

We got treated to a winter wonderland this week, with a heavy dump of snow that blanketed everything for days. It certainly made the building site of the garden look a little more appealing.