It’s been a busy time, these last few months, with lots of travel, lots of visits, and very little DIY. Sitting down to work out what we have left to do inside the house, the list looks tantalisingly short, yet since writing it we’ve not ticked much off.

A few week ago we took our van for its first proper trip. In order to make it a little more comfortable we had to knuckle down to get a few jobs done.

First we installed a carpet…on the ceiling. This ‘van carpet’, is often used to line vans, and is a kind of felted material that you attach with a sprayable glue. Having decided the ceiling was a little messy, with all the gaps and joins, this seemed like an easy solution. It was wonderfully easy to install, so I’m not surprised it’s an option many people go for.

As well as the ceiling, there were some other bits to finish, like joining up the batteries to the car motor so they could recharge, and connecting the pump, tap and tank. Chris handled these electrical and pumbing bits of pieces, while I sanded filling and screwed a few remaining boards in place.

In the end we left with a van with running water, electrics, a bed and a camping stove. All functional, though a little rough around the edges.

Inside the house, there was some little bits of plastering to do, including behind the piano where we’d moved the radiator, and at the base of the landing wall. Nothing exciting but making things ready to paint.

For a while mice have been letting themselves in and hanging out under our kitchen cupboards. Luckily they can’t get in to eat the food, but they leave their droppings for us to clean up. We’ve been puzzled as to how they were getting in, till Chris discovered all the insulation around our heat pump pipes had been nibbled away, giving them perfect access into our house. I plugged the gap with some mortar, so we’ll have to see if they find another sneaky route into our house.

Having cut out the kitchen windowsills, I didn’t get round to treating them, and with a few accidental spillages while watering, they started to get marked. To save them I sanded them back down and applied some varnish. It was a relief to see they cleaned up OK. Chris then installed them.

A job we’ve been putting off for ages is cleaning and sealing the windows. This is because I’ve tried a few different hacks to clean off the expandy foam marks and nothing worked. However, after some research online, Chris found some expandy foam cleaner. It worked a treat on the PVC windows, and we quickly got those cleaned and sealed. However, as we suspected, it peeled off the paint from the wooden windows. Annoyingly this means we’ll need to sand and repaint the wooden windows, a rookie mistake not to fully mask them before filling with expandy foam.

In the front garden, I spent some time weeding the main bed, while Chris tidied up the bed directly in front of the house. Its going to take a fair amount of compost to fill this bed, but it looks a little tidier at least.

The main bed is a little wild, full of self-seeded red campion, foxgloves and buttercup, as well as our more intentional planting. It’s lovely to see so much flowering though, and little by little we’ll build a little order into it. But not too much order of course.