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| A selection of Spring flowers from Mum's garden |
Well, we’ve
made it into 2024! The time seems to be rushing past and my intention
to publish at least one blog a month has already failed!
There was a
flurry of viewings of my house in January which resulted, finally, in an offer.
It was spectacularly less than I’d hoped to get back in the early part of 2023,
but I accepted anyway as I need to move forward. I assume that the whole
process will take the usual snail’s pace to complete but I am allowing myself a
small glimmer of hope that sometime, in late Spring, the transaction will be
done and dusted.
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| The Hobby Room (note dust on lens!) |
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| The finished Hobby Room |
Meanwhile, back in the ‘new’ house things have been moving along. I finally hired the sanders – a big, heavy brute of a drum sander and its little cousin, the edge sander, for a weekend in January. My first challenge came when I went to get them out of the car – I couldn’t lift the drum sander at all and had to ask my friends to come and help me and then carry it up the stairs, as I was going to start on the two rooms upstairs, before tackling the two reception rooms. Even then things did not proceed smoothly. Karen busied herself in the main bedroom attempting to scrape off the remains of the old, double-sided carpet tape that had virtually become part of the floorboards, while Ade got to work using the edging sander. Meanwhile, I started using the drum sander in the smallest room (henceforth to be referred to as The Hobby or Craft Room!) and it was all looking good until, inexplicably, the machine suddenly stopped and refused to start again. I knew that it probably had a thermal cutout to prevent overheating of the motor but couldn’t understand why it would have overheated so quickly, but I decided to leave it a while to cool down before attempting to restart it.
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| The Main Bedroom (note dusty lens, again!) |
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| The finished floor |
Back in the
front bedroom things were also going badly – the tape was welded to the floor
and the only thing that seemed to loosen it at all were copious applications of
WD40 and vigorous scraping, and the edge sander kept ripping off its sanding
discs and destroying them. I’d been given armfuls of sanding discs and sheets
in three different grades and would only be charged for the number that I used,
but at this rate, we would run out before the job was half done! Ade discovered
that by using two discs, one on top of the other, and also the judicious use of
gaffer tape as a strengthener across the back, it improved the life of them,
but it was still a worry.
I’d collected
the sanders at 9.00am on the Friday morning and by lunchtime we’d made very
little progress: the drum sander was still refusing to start; the edge sander
was still occasionally destroying discs, but at least most of the double-sided
tape had been removed from the edges of the room. At this point, Karen and Ade
had to go home as they had other commitments for the rest of the day, and I rang
the hire company and asked them to replace the drum sander with one that would
actually work. Fair play to them, they drove over almost straight away with a
new one, came up the stairs and checked the first one which, of course, started
straight away, leaving me red-faced with embarrassment! They took that one and
I proceeded to use the new one which seemed to be a lot more enthusiastic about
the job and kept trying to pull me across the floor!
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| The heavy drum sander |
I’m very glad to say that my son, Dave, volunteered to help me over the weekend and did a sterling job with the heavy drum sander whilst I wielded the edge sander. It was a messy, dusty, frustrating, energy-sapping job but by the end of the weekend we had managed to sand all four floors with three different grades of sandpaper and had some beautiful floorboards awaiting varnish. It was at this point that I returned to Cheltenham to spend some more time with Mum.
During the latter
part of 2023 Mum had developed arthritis in her left ankle and this was making
walking painful, so that she was struggling to keep up her level of fitness.
The wet and windy weather that we had endured during the autumn and winter had
also curtailed her outings, so she was feeling very frustrated. Her podiatrist
suggested a course of laser treatment which meant two appointments each week
for three weeks, so I was very glad to be on hand to take her to the majority
of them, saving her a bus ride or a taxi fare. She also had a couple of
hospital appointments – one in Cheltenham and one in Gloucester, so I have
become very familiar with hospital car parks and waiting rooms in general.
Unfortunately, the weather was still wet and windy, so we didn’t stray far from
home but the weekend that I went home again the weather improved and Lynda and
Paul came down from Sheffield so were able to take Mum for some nice drives in
the Cotswolds and to see the emerging snowdrops at Rendcomb.
Back in Somerset
for a couple of weeks I got on with the floor varnishing – 3 coats in every
room plus a light sanding between coats 2 and 3 and am thrilled with the results!
I’ve tried to ignore the new signs of damp on one of the walls in my freshly
decorated bedroom, the exploding damp plaster in the sitting room and the
internal drip of water onto the windowsill in the dining room – all these
things can be sorted when the house is finally mine (I keep telling myself!). I
have also finished the wardrobe cupboard that I created by blocking up one of
the doors and doubling its size – it will now be a useful storage space with
shelves on one side and a long shelf with hanging rail beneath.
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| My newly created wardrobe cupboard |
In my spare
time(!), I managed to go to the first Craft Fair of 2024 in Wells Town Hall. To
be honest, it was a good excuse to sit down for a day and concentrate on
something else! It was a slow day as the weather was not great, but there was a
trickle of customers, and I made a small profit whilst networking (chatting!)
with my fellow traders. One chap made owl and other bird boxes, bat roosts and
bug hotels out of reclaimed timber so I am hoping, at some point, to buy a
couple of items from him for my new, wildlife-friendly garden. Next time I have
a stall, in early March, I am going to take my spinning wheel with me as this
always creates interest.
I am now back
in Cheltenham for a week or so, where I have managed to repair the larder floor
which I put my foot through the last time I was here! Dad had made a false
floor over some old, disconnected gas pipes using chipboard covered in vinyl
tiles, not long after they moved in some 40 years ago and one piece of the
board had obviously aged more than the rest! Cue a trip to B & Q in
Cheltenham to buy plywood and new stick-on vinyl tiles and a day later I’d
managed to make good the damage I’d done. Phew! I’m supposed to be here to help
Mum not create more jobs that need sorting.
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| Mum's reinstated larder floor! |
I’m off back to
Somerset soon as my gardening jobs will restart at the beginning of March, and
I need to do some work in my own garden, too.
