Switching from one job to another I took a fortnight off, both to free up time for some IVF appointments and to push on with some DIY projects.

Unexcitingly, I spent good amount of time filling the edges around the wall on the stairs. Still it was nice to tidy up a rough edge.

There was a scratty bit of hedging alongside the car parking space. To rejuvenate it, we laid the remaining hedge plants and filled in the gaps with new whips.

Now the spikey blackthorns were out of the way, I tidied up the drystone wall and shifted a pile of stones off the bed to allow the wildflowers a chance to grow.

I also rebuilt a bit of the drystone wall along the back of the house.

In preparation for laying the back hedge, I removed an old fence that was in the way. Chris also wheelbarrowed gravel up to lay a path through the garden.

All our radiators were installed before we had a clear idea of how to set up the rooms. Having lived with the radiator in its current location for a while, we’ve decided to move it to the other side of the room, under the window and behind the sofa.

The first job to achieve this was to lay the pipe. As the fireplace is in the way this meant creating a hole through the base and fitting the pipes through it. The remaining pipe I attached to loose skirting board, as this will allow us to raise it once the flooring goes in.

The pipes in, the next job will be to move and attach the radiator, but as this means draining the system, we’re going to hold off till the weather warms up.

Having made templates for my windowsills, I got the chance to cut out the first two when a new piece of worktop arrived. Now they’re in place we just need to round the edges and stain. I’m itching to get onto the rest of the windowsills, but these are going to be made from elm planks and we first need to decide how to join the planks together.

On the stairs I filled, sanded and painted the wood above the spindles. I was sad to cover over the original wood colour, but in order to fit in with the lounge it all had to be brown.

And on the stairs themselves, I stained and sanded the spindles and the edge closest to the wall. We’d been debating whether to paint this edge the same colour as the wall, given there’s some staining from the lime plaster, but in the end we decided it wasn’t very visible.

We’d discussed for a while creating some kind of coat rack/ shoe storage unit on the side of the units in the utility, both to hide the gaps, but also to give us more practical storage.

Mostly we wanted somewhere to store our wellies, however building a unit from the radiator to the edge of the units only created storage for two sets of wellies. Pondering on it, Chris decided we might as well move the radiator, as it wasn’t in a great place anyway, being stuck behind the cupboards. With that moved we could build storage wide enough for three pairs of wellies.

Using inspiration from other coat racks online, we cut out the pieces and joined them together with pocket holes – a fancy way to drilling at an angle so as to hide the holes internally.

The pieces went together pretty quickly with the two of us, and I then filled, sanded and painted the structure with a primer. The final coat will have to wait till we’ve managed to paint match our existing units. Then there’s another radiator to move before everything can fit in snuggly.

Before we got too far into spring I wanted to lay a line of hedging at the back of the house. To give me a hand my friend Monika joined me to learn the ropes. This section makes up roughly half of the hedging at the back of the house, but the other half sits on top of a 0.5m wide bank on top of the crumbling walls of the old toilet block. While I would like to do it at some point it’s going to be a fiddly balancing act, and I didn’t fancy it this time round.

The next bit of construction was to start on the storage under the stairs, a set of pull out draws with a bookshelf on top. Chris and I worked together on the base, before he headed to work and I messed around getting the worktop and the bookshelves in.

As straightforward as it first appeared, as always the wonkiness of everything in the house just makes things more fiddly and complicated. I need to make some final adjustments before I can join the bookcase all together, then it’ll be onto the drawers.

In the garden, Chris requested I paint the frames of the old windows, and fill and paint the old door. It’s need another coat to make the yellow a little richer.

One of the jobs on my to do list was to sort the junk cluttering up the study. To do this I picked up a second hand set of draws to fit under the desk, and myself and Chris went through the boxes we’d moved from the old house.

With those bits tidied away I took DIY bits out to the shed, and took other bits and pieces to the recycling center. Finally, all that remains is a second hand mattress Chris bought to cut into beds for the dog, and a few pieces for the attic. But despite that we are now ready to get a carpet for this room, which will make it feel significantly more finished.

Spring has definitely sprung here, but I’m still hopeful we can get the inside of the house done before summer, mostly because I want to spend the summer in the garden and on the campervan. Feels like we’ve made a good step forward recently, and my list is getting a little shorter each week.