Having been set free on my maternity leave, but no baby having appeared just yet, I used the time to tick off a few more jobs.

With the first layer of plaster finally dry on the fireplace, I was able to apply the final coat of lime plaster. A light sand and I painted it to match the rest of the wall.

As the paint was out, I decided to finally give our wall lights a touch up. Having protected them with masking tape a long time ago, they were still marked with the tape glue. Washing off the worst, I painted with an undercoat, and then applied the same paint as the bookshelves, before touching up the wall.

A small job, but one that had been bugging me since the new carpet went down on the landing, was stripping the shower room door. The final door to still have it’s dark green coating, I planned to use stripper and sanding to get it back to a base layer. However, unlike the other doors, which had a base coat of brown, the base coat on this door was white, giving it a very different look from the other sanded doors. But, we’re not a house of matching objects, and I still like the finished effect.

With no baby still on the weekend, Chris also set to on a few jobs. He decided to finish sanding the chest of drawers, before treating them with beeswax. This meant I could finally fill the drawers with baby clothes. As a finishing touch to the nursery he also hung the pictures we’d put aside for the room.

Another sanding job, Chris sanded down the entrance strips he’d installed, before treating them. For the bedroom door, Chris began installing a new doorframe, as the existing one was too wonky to allow the door to hang well.

Having brought a fold down ladder for the attic, Chris spent some time installing it, as well as adjusting the loft hatch so it could open on hinges.

A non-urgent job was to tile the downstairs toilet windowsill. Though a tiny job, it was very fiddly, with most of the tiles needing to be cut. It’s not the neatest finish, but I’m happy to have it done.

Chris organised a delivery of fencing posts for the garden. He and his brother will be installing it soon, so the dog can use the garden unsupervised, hopefully making it easier to work on the garden with both a dog and a baby to look after.

It was about this point where I ran out of jobs I could do while heavily pregnant, and without Chris’s help, as he needed to continue working. Luckily, the baby also decided now was the time. A little girl has appeared in our lives, ready to move into her room. With that there will probably be a little pause in DIY, though I’m hoping she’ll be up for a little garden transformation this summer. We’ll see, she’s still working things out, as are myself and Chris.