Thirty One
The beginning of the week is very dull, shedwise. We’re really stuck until Derek the Dab can come and put up the plasterboard. We decorate a fruit cake and take delivery of the pale green woodwash for the stud wall – nice colour! We paint little samples of our ‘cookie dough’ and ‘ivory’ onto postcards and try them all together. Lovely. Paint sorted.
On Wednesday Derek phones to say that he can start doing the boards and have I got them yet. I haven’t. He says that B&Q are doing boards for £4.95 so he’ll get them from there unless Travis Perkins (where I now proudly have a trade card) can do them cheaper. I phone TP and, after a bit of haggling, I get them down to £4.94. Well, every penny and all that…
There is then what can only be described as a teensy breakdown in communications. Having said to Derek that TP won’t be able to deliver and he’ll have to pick them up and I’ll let him know where, I presume that my text saying ‘ordered and paid for at TP’ will let him know where he’s getting them from. He, on the other hand, takes ‘ordered’ to mean ‘ordered to be delivered’ and doesn’t pick them up. When he arrives he says ‘where are the boards, then?’ and I say ‘ha ha funny joke you’ve got them’ and he says ‘ha ha funny joke no I haven’t.’ We quickly establish that neither of us has the boards, so he fits the one fire board Jim the Stove delivered last week, and goes home again. I ask about his tattoo and he strips off to the waist to show me - we both agree this is the moment when Guy will turn up and find me in the shed with a half naked man…
On Thursday it works a whole lot better, and I get a phone call mid afternoon to say that he’s doing well but he’s run out of boards and can I pay for some more which he will go and collect. Excellent. Another teensy problem at this point – I’ve lost my voice. It’s been gone all day, and I can really only whisper. Derek has managed to hear me (just) but phoning the builder’s merchants might be a whole different ball game. I give it a go. ‘Hello’ I whisper, ‘It’s Mrs Bowden, can you hear me?’ I can hear a lot of ‘shushing’ and the radio being turned off in the background and then Les (he tells me he’s Les, and he’s a big bear of a bloke) says in a whisper ‘Try again’. I whisper again who I am, and that I want some more boards. ‘No problem’ he whispers back… and I place my order and give him my credit card details. ‘Sorry about the voice’ I say at the end. ‘No problem, take care’ he whispers back. By far the gentlest phone transaction ever completed!
By the time Guy and I get home the back room is nearly finished, so we make coffee and stand around making admiring noises while Derek does all the work. The weather has turned, and it’s cold, so Guy and I are in hats, gloves and coats while Derek is busy taking layers off as he’s getting warm from working so hard. He is so fast it’s funny. We watch and try to work out just how long it would have taken us to do…
The plan is for us to do the plastering, so I hit the internet for some tips. The first dozen or so sites I look at advise ‘it’s difficult, get a professional in’. Big help. Derek lends us a hawk (board thing to put the plaster on) and a float (trowel for putting it on the wall) and we buy ourselves another set so that we can both plaster. Skim. Whatever it’s called. And we buy plaster.
We make a start. We mix half a bag of plaster in a big bucket with the whisk attachment to the power drill (fab toy). We are working inside and it whisks itself onto Guy, me and every available wall. Maybe outside next time? We tip it out onto a board. Not all of it comes out, so we hit the bucket. All the dry unmixed stuff falls on top of the mixed stuff. We put it all back in the bucket and mix it again… This time it works, and we’re away. We start on the two small walls in the storage area to practice because they don’t involve ladders or trestles. I’m quicker, and Guy swears more. We both drop a lot on the floor, which we then stand in and spread around. I put mine on thinner, Guy’s is thicker. We have a look at both walls and decide somewhere between the two is good. We wait five minutes and then ‘smooth’ the plaster. A professional plasterer would then flick water on it, do it again, and then go over it twice more. We decide after our first ‘smooth’ that it looks pretty damned fine and that it is, after all, a storage area.
Mum comes to see how we’re getting on, and makes us coffee. She is amused by the state of us (pretty much covered in plaster) and says that if Guy’s hands weren’t so clean she’d have A Damned Good Idea where they’d been… Next we do the ceiling. It is at this point that we discover we should have done the ceiling first, as now we’re dropping wet plaster on the already plastered walls. Bummer. We persevere… I’m up on the trestles slapping it on the ceiling, and Guy is keeping me supplied with plaster on the hawk things. It’s not as bad to do as we’d suspected and we do our ‘one smooth’ routine again – and we’re done! After lunch we tackle the big back wall, but run out of mixed plaster near the bottom – Guy quickly mixes up more and we discover just how wet ‘too wet’ is. On the plus side, having it very runny does mean that you can actually pour it onto the trowel… Or, at least, you can if you haven’t already let it all slide off the hawk onto the floor. We are KNACKERED by the time we finish – I have a long hot bath and spend half an hour picking plaster off my trackie bottoms, and Guy goes off to a gig…
On Sunday we do the remaining wall in the storage area. We cleverly mix the plaster thicker this time, and quickly discover just how stiff ‘too stiff’ is. We can barely spread it on the wall, and it’s really hard work. It looks like it’s never going to be smooth. I do the first ‘smooth’ and it’s still a disaster. I stand on the trestle and flick water all over it (and all over Guy who is now at the bottom of the wall) and we smooth again… it works! We also find that a paintbrush makes the joint between the walls smooth… Hooray! By the time we plaster the front room we might actually have a vague idea of what we’re meant to be doing…
We tidy up (takes AGES) and take a trip to the dump with the offcut plasterboard (lots) and dead lumps of plaster (lots). Then we fix up the outside light, move one socket in the front room to make plastering easier, woodwash the back of the internal door, add more gravel to the path, burn rubbish, and sand down four internal doors that have been sticking in the utility room. Normal Sunday, really…
Achieved: We’ve plastered the back room! And ourselves. And the floor.
Hours worked: Lots plastering. And all the other bits we did on Sunday.
Purchases: Plasterboard, plaster, plasterboard again, more plasterboard, hawk, trowel, gin.
Pressies: Friday was Santes Dwynwen day – the Welsh equivalent of Valentine’s Day. Guy bought me beautiful red roses. I bought him mushrooms. In my defence, I had left my purse at home and we needed mushrooms, so with the few coins I found in the bottom of my bag I chose ‘dinner’ over ‘romance’. Yes, I know, rubbish excuse.
Tip of the week: Plaster the ceiling first. Thank you, we know now.
Wildlife update: There seems to be a mouse in the outside loo. We know this because he’s chewing the polystyrene insulation so it looks like it’s snowing in there… Bet it’s cosy though!
Plan for the week: Paint the other side of the internal door (now off its hinges and in the pool cabin), strip the pew ends, Derek will come back to finish the plasterboarding, plaster the front room next weekend. Start with the ceiling.
Lack of communication of the week – Part 1. That has to be Derek and the non picking-up of the plasterboard. It’s sorted for this week – I said to PICK IT UP PLEASE. That should do it.
Lack of communication of the week – Part 2. My voice going. It is now back, thank you. Guy said he quite liked the peace…
Lack of communication of the week – Part 3. On Saturday Izzy was very vocal at lunchtime, and we thought that, Lassie-like, she was trying to tell us something. We couldn’t figure out what, so we gave her lunch instead. What she was trying to say was that I had locked BB in my car and he was stuck. I found him about 9 at night… he was a bit peeved.
Lack of communication of the week – Part 4. Derek told us what plaster to buy – ‘Fissell Multi Finish’. Don’t some of these companies have silly names? When we got it we couldn’t help laughing… It’s ‘Thistle Multi Finish.’
Good news of the week: It stopped raining! There are snowdrops, primroses and a daffodil in the garden - makes you think Spring might be just around the corner!
On Wednesday Derek phones to say that he can start doing the boards and have I got them yet. I haven’t. He says that B&Q are doing boards for £4.95 so he’ll get them from there unless Travis Perkins (where I now proudly have a trade card) can do them cheaper. I phone TP and, after a bit of haggling, I get them down to £4.94. Well, every penny and all that…
There is then what can only be described as a teensy breakdown in communications. Having said to Derek that TP won’t be able to deliver and he’ll have to pick them up and I’ll let him know where, I presume that my text saying ‘ordered and paid for at TP’ will let him know where he’s getting them from. He, on the other hand, takes ‘ordered’ to mean ‘ordered to be delivered’ and doesn’t pick them up. When he arrives he says ‘where are the boards, then?’ and I say ‘ha ha funny joke you’ve got them’ and he says ‘ha ha funny joke no I haven’t.’ We quickly establish that neither of us has the boards, so he fits the one fire board Jim the Stove delivered last week, and goes home again. I ask about his tattoo and he strips off to the waist to show me - we both agree this is the moment when Guy will turn up and find me in the shed with a half naked man…
On Thursday it works a whole lot better, and I get a phone call mid afternoon to say that he’s doing well but he’s run out of boards and can I pay for some more which he will go and collect. Excellent. Another teensy problem at this point – I’ve lost my voice. It’s been gone all day, and I can really only whisper. Derek has managed to hear me (just) but phoning the builder’s merchants might be a whole different ball game. I give it a go. ‘Hello’ I whisper, ‘It’s Mrs Bowden, can you hear me?’ I can hear a lot of ‘shushing’ and the radio being turned off in the background and then Les (he tells me he’s Les, and he’s a big bear of a bloke) says in a whisper ‘Try again’. I whisper again who I am, and that I want some more boards. ‘No problem’ he whispers back… and I place my order and give him my credit card details. ‘Sorry about the voice’ I say at the end. ‘No problem, take care’ he whispers back. By far the gentlest phone transaction ever completed!
By the time Guy and I get home the back room is nearly finished, so we make coffee and stand around making admiring noises while Derek does all the work. The weather has turned, and it’s cold, so Guy and I are in hats, gloves and coats while Derek is busy taking layers off as he’s getting warm from working so hard. He is so fast it’s funny. We watch and try to work out just how long it would have taken us to do…
The plan is for us to do the plastering, so I hit the internet for some tips. The first dozen or so sites I look at advise ‘it’s difficult, get a professional in’. Big help. Derek lends us a hawk (board thing to put the plaster on) and a float (trowel for putting it on the wall) and we buy ourselves another set so that we can both plaster. Skim. Whatever it’s called. And we buy plaster.
We make a start. We mix half a bag of plaster in a big bucket with the whisk attachment to the power drill (fab toy). We are working inside and it whisks itself onto Guy, me and every available wall. Maybe outside next time? We tip it out onto a board. Not all of it comes out, so we hit the bucket. All the dry unmixed stuff falls on top of the mixed stuff. We put it all back in the bucket and mix it again… This time it works, and we’re away. We start on the two small walls in the storage area to practice because they don’t involve ladders or trestles. I’m quicker, and Guy swears more. We both drop a lot on the floor, which we then stand in and spread around. I put mine on thinner, Guy’s is thicker. We have a look at both walls and decide somewhere between the two is good. We wait five minutes and then ‘smooth’ the plaster. A professional plasterer would then flick water on it, do it again, and then go over it twice more. We decide after our first ‘smooth’ that it looks pretty damned fine and that it is, after all, a storage area.
Mum comes to see how we’re getting on, and makes us coffee. She is amused by the state of us (pretty much covered in plaster) and says that if Guy’s hands weren’t so clean she’d have A Damned Good Idea where they’d been… Next we do the ceiling. It is at this point that we discover we should have done the ceiling first, as now we’re dropping wet plaster on the already plastered walls. Bummer. We persevere… I’m up on the trestles slapping it on the ceiling, and Guy is keeping me supplied with plaster on the hawk things. It’s not as bad to do as we’d suspected and we do our ‘one smooth’ routine again – and we’re done! After lunch we tackle the big back wall, but run out of mixed plaster near the bottom – Guy quickly mixes up more and we discover just how wet ‘too wet’ is. On the plus side, having it very runny does mean that you can actually pour it onto the trowel… Or, at least, you can if you haven’t already let it all slide off the hawk onto the floor. We are KNACKERED by the time we finish – I have a long hot bath and spend half an hour picking plaster off my trackie bottoms, and Guy goes off to a gig…
On Sunday we do the remaining wall in the storage area. We cleverly mix the plaster thicker this time, and quickly discover just how stiff ‘too stiff’ is. We can barely spread it on the wall, and it’s really hard work. It looks like it’s never going to be smooth. I do the first ‘smooth’ and it’s still a disaster. I stand on the trestle and flick water all over it (and all over Guy who is now at the bottom of the wall) and we smooth again… it works! We also find that a paintbrush makes the joint between the walls smooth… Hooray! By the time we plaster the front room we might actually have a vague idea of what we’re meant to be doing…
We tidy up (takes AGES) and take a trip to the dump with the offcut plasterboard (lots) and dead lumps of plaster (lots). Then we fix up the outside light, move one socket in the front room to make plastering easier, woodwash the back of the internal door, add more gravel to the path, burn rubbish, and sand down four internal doors that have been sticking in the utility room. Normal Sunday, really…
Achieved: We’ve plastered the back room! And ourselves. And the floor.
Hours worked: Lots plastering. And all the other bits we did on Sunday.
Purchases: Plasterboard, plaster, plasterboard again, more plasterboard, hawk, trowel, gin.
Pressies: Friday was Santes Dwynwen day – the Welsh equivalent of Valentine’s Day. Guy bought me beautiful red roses. I bought him mushrooms. In my defence, I had left my purse at home and we needed mushrooms, so with the few coins I found in the bottom of my bag I chose ‘dinner’ over ‘romance’. Yes, I know, rubbish excuse.
Tip of the week: Plaster the ceiling first. Thank you, we know now.
Wildlife update: There seems to be a mouse in the outside loo. We know this because he’s chewing the polystyrene insulation so it looks like it’s snowing in there… Bet it’s cosy though!
Plan for the week: Paint the other side of the internal door (now off its hinges and in the pool cabin), strip the pew ends, Derek will come back to finish the plasterboarding, plaster the front room next weekend. Start with the ceiling.
Lack of communication of the week – Part 1. That has to be Derek and the non picking-up of the plasterboard. It’s sorted for this week – I said to PICK IT UP PLEASE. That should do it.
Lack of communication of the week – Part 2. My voice going. It is now back, thank you. Guy said he quite liked the peace…
Lack of communication of the week – Part 3. On Saturday Izzy was very vocal at lunchtime, and we thought that, Lassie-like, she was trying to tell us something. We couldn’t figure out what, so we gave her lunch instead. What she was trying to say was that I had locked BB in my car and he was stuck. I found him about 9 at night… he was a bit peeved.
Lack of communication of the week – Part 4. Derek told us what plaster to buy – ‘Fissell Multi Finish’. Don’t some of these companies have silly names? When we got it we couldn’t help laughing… It’s ‘Thistle Multi Finish.’
Good news of the week: It stopped raining! There are snowdrops, primroses and a daffodil in the garden - makes you think Spring might be just around the corner!
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