again, more of a wall than a river but I might just keep going with river based lyrics until someone acknowledges them 😉
This morning began with piano moving. Ed who is the King of Disorganisation and a self confessed ‘Faffer’ went off into the village to see if he could borrow a flat bed trolley to move the piano moments before the builders were due to arrive to collect it in their van. The builders are a father and son team called Barry and Alan (who I decided to call Bazza and Azza – one of the many habits I have inherited from my Dad is trying to make names rhyme by shortening them. My all time favourite is my friends Heather and Derek who liked my Hel and Del version so much they use it in their email address :)) who hail from Yorkshire and were indeed Very Yorkshire :).
By the time Ed had returned with a trolley Ady, Azza and Bazza had got the piano on the way to being out of the house. It is incredibly heavy and not on wheels or castors. I was deemed far too female to be helping and on this occassion chose to allow that assumption to continue 😉 I’ve done enough humping, dumping and lifting this year to salve my feminist leanings and am quite happy to be excused aslong as I am not expected to busy myself making tea instead.
Piano duly loaded (much grunting and sweating and oophing involved) Azza and Bazza headed off in their van and we folllowed shortly afterwards in Ed’s car. The first job at the house was to have a cup of tea, then the cast iron bath needed moving upstairs. I made a couple of suggestions neither of which were much help (one was for two of them to lift the bath and the other two to grab it, it wouldn’t have reached. The other was to tie rope around the bath to give better grips for holding and lifting. I suspect this may have worked but they managed without anyway) so I was given the video camera to get some footage of the bath being taken upstairs and the piano being brought in. I was much better at this than lifting things and even added a little commentary which I am sure Ed and Carina will enjoy when they eventually watch it back :).
That done I oiled the worktop the sink is fitted into, which used to a school science lab bench and still has the little hole cut in for a bunsen burner (now filled). It came up really nice, although will need a couple more layers of oil on it.
Then Ady and I set to painting – I was doing the front wall in a pale green while Ady was giving a side wall a second coat of sand colour. I was painting direct onto this breathable clay which doesn’t seem to have been an entirely successful eco building material using natural coloured paint which smelt gorgeous, all reminscent of eucalyptus and was a lovely pale green colour but went on badly. I was enjoying thinking about what my dad might think of it all – he hates using faddy paints. I was also given a roller to use which is another of Dad’s pet hates so I felt I channelled him well today.
After lunch the kids came and helped too which was nice. They are enjoying this host lots but we aren’t seeing much of them and they don’t do much with us so it was good to have them working with us and singing along to the music too 🙂
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At 3pm it was tidy up time and Ed was filled with praise at how very hard we’d worked today. These are by far our nicest and least expectant hosts! :). Ed dropped us off in the village to pick up some lures for our fishing rods and we walked back intending to collect our rods and have an hour or so fishing but it started to rain quite persistently so we gave up on that idea and just came in.
The kids went to play with Peter who was home from school and Ady and I helped chop veg for dinner which was fish, bought from the local fishermen who actually do catch things – we had herring and haddock, both by-catch fish from their main hauls, but very nice. After dinner we all watched one of the Ocean Giants documentaries and the kids all played a board game for a bit before bed.
Tomorrow we are off again as they are all off to the new house in the morning and then a Smallholders fete thing in the afternoon. We’re intending heading to the smallholders thing too but under our own steam as we won’t all fit in their car. Which means yesterday was a bonus day off as we’ve already been told we’ll have Sunday off too. I want to go along to the beaver trail thing so we may do that on Sunday depending on weather and fishing possibilities.
The painting would maybe have been better if the Walls were wetted first then given a mist coat of 50:50 paint and water before a just paint coat? That’s what we’re doing on our newly plastered bits as otherwise the plaster material (and the roller-we’re using brushes for the mist coat) just sucks all the water content up and you can be left with flaky paint.
And yes, we’ve learned that by doing a patch direct and puzzling over why we had flaky paint patches.
Comment by Michelle — 03 September 2011 @ 8:47 am