Oops

There was a slight hitch on the flooring plans today, as I sliced my thigh open with a stanley knife while trimming a tile. The cut wasn’t too long, but it was deep and squirting a fair amount of blood (none of which got on the tiles - yay!). Jim drove me up to the hospital, where they rolled their eyes, glued it back together, bandaged me up and ticked a little box on a statistics form that presumably says “Enthusiastic Yet Incompetent DIY-er”.

So, instead of progressing on the floor front, I spent the afternoon twiddling with little work tasks, drinking tea, eating chocolate biscuits and generally feeling sorry for myself. I’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow, but hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with my tiling schedule by the weekend. If not, I may have to end the cure a few days late.

Wardrobe Therapy - The Interview

Dr Wende has had the brilliant idea of adapting Apartment Therapy to Wardrobe Therapy. This is one of the Week One tasks - an addendum to the style questionnaire in the AT book:

Candidate for “Best Dressed,” real or fictional.
Amelie from Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain
Erin from A Dress A Day (she makes themed but grown-up dresses for work events - how wonderful is that?)

Favorite garment/outfit EVER. That’s a hard one. Most of my favourite outfits have been things that make me feel happy, even though they probably didn’t flatter me much. My all time favourite has to be the Little House on the Prairie outfit I had when I was 8 - a brown gingham checked dress with a calico pinafore on top. Since then, it has probably been clothes which make me feel unconstricted and happy-go-lucky, though it’s hard to think of examples.

Current favorite garment. A green knitted wool pinafore dress. It is so comfortable and I love the colour and shape. I probably shouldn’t wear it with bovver boots, though. I probably shouldn’t wear it at all, in fact, as I am no longer 8 years old.

Favorite thing to wear, if reality weren’t an issue in any way, shape, or form. A really comfortable, flattering dress in a fun print with boots (winter) or birkenstocks (summer).

Favorite store, given unlimited wealth. It wouldn’t actually be a store. I’d have a private dressmaker with access to brilliant fabrics who would interpret my whims and make me a fabulous wardrobe of dresses for every occasion. S/he would be someone I could ring up and say, “I’m thinking of a-line bananas with a green trim” and, lo, said banana dress would arrive the next week.

Favorite fashion faux-pas story to tell, now that the scars have healed. The scars have not healed. Sorry.

If there were a uniform for the place where you spend most of your time, what would it be? Pyjamas. I work at home. I really should get some “day pyjamas”. On the few occasions per week when I venture out to work in places that do not supply bed linen (museums, draughty country houses, archives, etc), the uniform could probably be described as ‘historian chic’ - warm tweed, ancient moth-eaten cardigans and woolly tights.

If there were a uniform for where you spend your leisure, what would it be? Pyjamas. I really must get a social life. When I do go out, it’s a casual anything-goes affair - people round here really wear what they want. I very rarely have any formal events to go to.

What is the problem with your wardrobe? There is too much of it. I am always living for the future (read “when I lose xx amount of weight”) regarding clothes and buying ‘make do’ items in the meantime. Result = a wardrobe full of stuff that doesn’t fit and has no spark.

If your wardrobe could speak, what would it say is the problem? Could I have some air, please? You need to get rid of everything that doesn’t fit. Also, just out of curiosity, could you please describe in detail the social event at which you plan on wearing the 50’s orange lamé cocktail dress with the broken zipper?

What one thing do you want your wardrobe to do more of? Clothe me appropriately and easily, so it is easy to get dressed in the morning without a daily wardrobe crisis.

What do you want people to say about your wardrobe? It is original and fun. My clothes always fit me perfectly. (I admire people who look fabulous when they are not “standard” sizes or shapes and I would like to be one of them - an ambassador for the short and dumpy.)

Today’s floor progress

It’s quite hard taking a photo of the cork floor under artificial light, but this is a fairly accurate, if slightly washed out, shot.

We’ve got most of the kitchen done today and will be able to move the appliances back in in the morning. Because of the floor levelling problems, it does undulate slightly in places and would look much better if we could have afforded a professional to do it for us. But, in my new optimistic and non-perfectionist state of mind, it is Good Enough.

Various levels of level

Well, the floor has been levelled, although that doesn’t mean it is level. The compound was a nightmare to use and we ended up with loads of trowel marks and troughs. It took a few hours of scraping at the surface after it had set to get a reasonable surface. It’s not ideal, but hopefully will be good enough. If it’s not, I don’t know what we’ll do.

The cork tiles are reasonably flexible, so should stick OK. I just hope they look OK. Another challenge will be making the most of the burr effect in the tiles to get a pleasing pattern throughout the floor. These four tiles are just lying on the floor, not stuck down yet:

We can start sticking them down tomorrow afternoon.

Suffolk latch

This is for Alana (and for anyone else who was wondering what a suffolk latch looks like). This is the latch on the door to my study upstairs:

It doesn’t look so rusty in real life, just nicely worn!

I am a dingbat

I did something incredibly stupid today. I got it into my head that a suffolk latch would be great on my new door and had merrily drilled holes, carved out various bits, fitted the handle to the front, etc. It was only when I was inside the cupboard putting the final screws in that I realised that it was then impossible for the door to open. It’s all a bit difficult to explain, but the upshot was that I had actually shut myself in the cupboard. Luckily I just needed to remove a few screws to get out, but still. All the paint fumes must have gone to my head.

Anyway, this is the door with a latch that actually works:

The walls around the door still need painting, which will get done over the next couple of days. Tomorrow, we’re ripping up the remainder of the carpet and getting everything ready to level the floor and lay the tiles.

Other disappointing news is that the lotus print arrived today and it is bright orange and not at all like it looked like on my monitor, so I’m sending that back tomorrow for a refund.

Behind schedule

The understairs cupboard is taking much longer than planned. The first coat of gloss on the shelves took two whole days to dry - I’ll be able to recoat it tonight, but that means everything needs to be stored elsewhere for another two days. Jim moved the electrical socket this morning. It took quite a few hours in the end, which meant I got behind on my door-making schedule, as everything from the cupboard was spread out on the floor space I needed to construct the door. At the moment the door looks like this:

It should be trimmed and primed already if I’m to get everything done this weekend. But now the Grand Prix qualifying is on and part of the bargain for the electrical socket was that I wouldn’t use power tools after 4.30 pm. So, I’m going to have a glass of wine and a bath and forget about it for a while. It’ll all get done somehow.

Damn - it stopped raining

So no lady-of-leisureness for me, today. I have still had some help, though - Jim had the day off work and put the first coat on the ceilings this morning. I’ll do the second coat and the walls over the next couple of days.

I did get my shoe rack assembled and stuff stored in the shed. The shoe rack has created another job because I didn’t take into account the electrical socket in the cupboard, which now needs to be moved up 10 cm so it can be used. Luckily the cabling is encased in a plastic channel attached to the wall, so it should be relatively simple to do. I’ve just got to remember to switch the electricity off at the mains, wear rubber wellies and make sure there is someone around to call an ambulance. No problem.

Hooray - it’s raining!

And that means that tomorrow my walls and ceilings will be painted and not by my own fair hand. I’ve got the delegating bug this week and after dropping weeks and weeks worth of washing at the laundry on Monday, I arranged for my plasterer/decorator friend to do my painting if it rained (as he wouldn’t be able to do the outdoor job he had lined up).

I think I could quite enjoy being a lady of leisure, as long as no one forced me to go shopping. I must have missed out on the ’shopping is fun’ lesson, because this afternoon was so tiring. Do you know how hard it is to find a melamine tea tray that a) is not pink and b) does not have some fluffy creature on it? I even saw one with pink fluffy handles. You’d think that the only person in the country who needed to transport tea things from one place to another was Barbara Cartland and she died seven years ago. Just who are all these tea-transporting pink fluffy kitten people that the marketing peeps have identified? Hmm?

The absence of tasteful tea trays aside, I did get everything I needed for the understairs cupboard - new shelves, some great baskets, a shoe rack (which turned out cheaper to buy than to make), a big hook for The Guitar That Lives Downstairs and some plastic storage boxes for storing stuff in the shed.

While Andy is painting tomorrow, I’m going to stack all the junk in the shed and assemble, stain and varnish the shoe rack… on Thursday, I’ll paint the cupboard (I had to do some emergency plastering, so am waiting for it to dry)… on Friday, I’ll assemble it all… over the weekend, I’ll make a new door for it… which all means that I’m on target to start Floor Week on Monday. It really is all coming together, and I’m quite amazed. This project has been going on for so long, I have had difficulty imagining actually finishing it.

Plan for the Cupboard

After much scribbling on scraps of paper, I now have a plan for the understairs cupboard. This afternoon, I realised that I had forgotten that I also need to store the spare dining chairs in there, which threw all my previous plans out of the window. Instead, I’m being ruthless and anything that doesn’t need to be easily accessed or stored inside is going out into the shed / garden.

For outside, I’m going to get another dustbin for plastics and cardboard that can sit next to our main dustbin outside the front door (and I will build a little screen / hutch for them when I sort out the shed). Glass and cans for recycling can also go there. Gardening tools are definitely going in the shed. I will also dispense with the mop bucket by getting one of the new e-cloth type mops, which don’t require dunking in water.

For the stuff that is staying, I have started to build some shelves in the least accessible part of the cupboard - these will be painted and the floor will be the cork tiles used elsewhere:

These shelves will hold the Outbox, tools and other small bits and bobs. The top shelf is where we will sling paper for recycling (which I will take to the recycling bank once a week on my way to get a Sunday paper). The hoover will sit in front of the right hand side of the shelves; the spare dining chairs will rest against the wall to the right. The rest of the cupboard will have a shoe rack with space on top for J’s workbag. Right near the ceiling will be a shelf for hats, gloves, torches etc, with hooks on the underside from which to hang coats. There will also be a big, sturdy hook for The Guitar That Lives Downstairs. The mini hoover will be attached to the wall, somewhere.

So that’s what I’ll be doing this week, along with making a new door for the cupboard. And working.