A mammoth undertaking

Rob the decorator has been here for the last two weeks, finishing off the job started by the builders who replaced the bedroom windows. They had left the woodwork primed but unpainted, and had also made a right mess of the wallpaper around the window frames. Bedroom 1 was last decorated when Christopher and I moved in, which must be getting on for twenty years ago. So it was well overdue being refreshed. It was actually one of the first jobs that Rob did, working as an apprentice to his father, and I think he found it a bit odd to be stripping the wallpaper that he’d originally put up.

It’s been a pretty grim two weeks – my bedroom was completely uninhabitable, most of its contents were in the bathroom so I couldn’t use that either, and the smell of paint was so strong that I couldn’t even decamp to bedroom 2 which is immediately adjacent. Instead, I’ve been sleeping in the “guest room” in the extension over the garage, at the far end of the house. But he has done a very good job. The bedroom is much fresher and brighter, and actually looks bigger as a result.  He’s also painted the windows in bedroom 2, and patched up the damaged wallpaper with offcuts from a spare roll that I’d kept from when it was originally papered. I couldn’t afford to have both rooms completely redecorated in one go, so it was a case of just doing the minimum in bedroom 2 to make it look reasonable. The only problem is that the newly painted woodwork really shows up how yellow and faded the rest of the paintwork is – but I’ll just live with that.

There was one issue that I had to deal with though. I had the valves on my radiators upgraded a few weeks ago, and Rob had requested that the radiators in my bedroom be left disconnected so that he could paper behind them easily and paint them properly. But he’s clearly a painter not a plumber, as he couldn’t work out how to put the radiators back on again once he’d finished! He was a bit sheepish about that, but I didn’t want him to try to force pipework to fit if he didn’t know what he was doing, as I was worried there would be a leak! Fortunately, the heating maintenance people I use are very accommodating, and sent the plumbers back today to put the system back together again and check it was all working. 

It only took them about an hour, but for that time I really did feel that I was taking part in a competition to see how many tradesmen’s vans I could have on my drive at once! As well as Rob the decorator and the plumber, the gardener had also turned up somewhat unexpectedly so there were three vans hemming my little mini in. It was a good job I’d taken today off work, as I was clearly not going to be able to get the car out!