It’s always the little jobs that seem to take an age. After previously filling and sanding the skirting in the lounge and part of the kitchen, I thought I’d do the quick job of painting it. However, the cheap and cheerful wood paint we’d brought was thin as water, and four coats later the small section of skirting had taken me half a day.

In the lounge, the much better quality cream heritage paint covered in two coats, and the TV unit is finally finished.

Upstairs I wanted to attach the windowsill in the spare bedroom but Chris reminded me he wanted the thicker insulated plasterboard replacing with the thinner fibre cement board. The reason was because the thicker board caused the windowsill to sit quite high on the windowframe. I felt a little bad replacing it given this was the third time, installed once by the contractors, only for my knee to go through it when we were installing the window, and then replaced by Max on his DIY week. Still at least all the boards were left overs from the previous work.

Frustratingly, having installed the new board it turned out the countersink bit was no where to be found, so I couldn’t install the windowsill after all.

So, with no luck installing windowsills, I moved on to cutting out the wood for the last one. Awkwardly the remaining wood was only just wider enough so I couldn’t afford to lose much in the cutting.

Having cut out the pieces I left them to dry for a few days before planing the edges and joining the pieces, and leaving the whole thing to set in the shed.

It wasn’t too tricky to cut the windowsill to shape for once, with just a couple of trims needed. I then used some wood filler on the gap for this new windowsill and the one I’d previously made for the study.

With that, and a bit of dry weather, I took both of the windowsills outside for a sand. The spruce was much rougher than the elm, and so harder to sand, but it came out well after working through a couple of grades of sandpaper.

Both done and back in their places, they just need attaching, screw holes filling and sanding, and treating… once we’ve bought a new countersink bit.

After umming and ahhing and ordering so many different tile samples the tile company rang me up, we finally settled on a pink for the downstairs toilet windowsill. I’ve marked them ready to cut, we just need to dig out the tile cutter.

While I’ve been ticking off the odd job here and there Chris has been preoccupied with a mixture of attending Christmas parties, working and being ill. However, he did manage to finally set up and install our weather station. He’d ordered it so we could monitor our wind speeds, with the plan to install a small wind turbine at some point to add to our green energy.

Phew – it’s felt a busy build up to Christmas but we’re finally here. A few days with family to do nothing but eat and slob around, and then a brief bit of DIY chaos to build up to the New Year – what else could you want?

Merry Christmas!