LornaJane

When the rewiring of the house was done in November and our parquet flooring was a casualty of the process. We've spent the months since then with a hallway that looks like this:



Please admire the retro red and orange floorboards!!

Anyway, things are looking a lot better now - we've got a new floor!! I am so excited by this that I am providing a cartoon strip style display :)









I forgot to photograph the doormat we got - its in the porch, fitted rubber-backed doormat stuff that you lay like a carpet. So first impressions on entering our place are now quite different (so long as you ignore the holes in the wall)

On Monday I start my new job and I'll be mostly working from home which will be nice, but quite a change. I have a lot of online friends that I have yet to meet in real life but to have a whole set of colleagues, some of them in another country (IBuildings is a Dutch company) is all new to me. It'll be nice to avoid the annoyances of sharing an office, with other people's music and cleaning up after others too. I know I am organised and self-motivated enough to manage the working patterns as well, which is one less thing to worry about. If I had needed to be in the office every day, I simply couldn't have managed it as they are based in London. In preparation for next week, I thought I'd share some photos of my home office. To the left are my flower pictures that I found in a box when we moved, they came from another house we previously rented.



I also have some essential accessories for any office: A map of the world and a nabaztag. This one is called Tag and is our second one of these rabbits.



Finally, check out my lovely big office chair, modelled here by my Christmas bear, now named Busibear as he lives in the office and oversees business. The chair was a birthday present from my parents, thanks mum and dad :)




I have a nice new notebook and a futon for any visitors that pop in, I think I'm all set...

I'm proud to announce that as of last week (Tuesday, to be precise) we are now the proud owners of a TV aerial and now have TV signal to the house. You can tell how much we enjoy the telly by the swiftness with which we had this done ... only 8 month and 4 days after buying the house!

I should point out that the TV signal doesn't actually reach the TV because we're deccorating and the TV is in the other room, but its progress. We had a second TV point put in to the office so the webserver can record stuff for us, so we can now watch things over the network. I can't see when we're going to have time to watch any of it but the recordings are there, just in case. I know a lot of people have thought it strange we didn't miss the TV, surely we can't be the only people who don't watch the thing?

I opened a metaphorical can of worms the other night. While fillering the last few holes in the last wall in the living room, almost ready to paint, I saw a break in the plaster and some black furry mould growing there. Now the wall had been a bit mouldy in other places but we just took some panelling off the walls and the room was a kitchen at one time so we didn't think a lot of it. So I chipped away at the crack, just to make sure there wasn't anything bad going on.

It was kinda black and furry underneath the plaster too, and I started to find layers of stuff under the plaster ...



At this point the smell of damp and the slightly wet wallpaper layers coming off the wall started to ring alarm bells and we started scraping to see how big the area affected was.



By the time we had got everything off the wall that we could, beyond the edges of the apparent damp and back to the original plaster covered with five distinct layers of (amazing, retro) wallpaper, then artex, then more plaster, then painted, we ended up with this:



We think this is all due to there having been a broken downspout exactly on the other side of that wall, it was broken when we moved in and we don't know how long it was like that. Its now fixed and the wall seems to be drying out OK on the inside.

However that leaves us with several large holes in the walls in that room, from rewiring, boiler removal, panelling removal and half a wall that wasn't plastered in the first place for reasons that aren't clear. There is also a weird bit in the ceiling after the shower leaked through it and we had to replace a whole section. It turns out that it is going to cost less than 400 pounds to have the whole thing, walls and ceilings, completely skimmed to flat walls and proper corners ... so they are coming on Wednesday to do it. We weren't planning on it but at least then we'll be able to paint and the walls will be much more beautiful than anything we'd manage ourselves.

This weekend has been, like many before it, DIY-tastic. I popped out to a party this afternoon and in the meantime Kevin put the finishing touches to the shelves in the little bedroom that we will use as an office. To put this in context, let's start with the "before" photo:



So here are the new shelves, finished today (the nice contrasting wall colour was the result of me popping to the DIY store and trying to guess which colour paint would be the closest match ... I've already been assured there is something wrong with my colour sense!):



And here's what they looked like an hour later, when I got some stuff unpacked onto them - they're really deep shelves and they are going to hold a lot of "stuff" :)



I'd also like to give special mention to this guy:



I had a build-a-bear voucher for Christmas so I went and chose this traditional style bear. He is stuffed really hard, so although he isn't cuddly, he is still soft and can sit up on his own. He'll be supervising operations in the new office and keeping me company when I am working here. All in all, I think its coming together rather well - all I need now is some ideas for small-scale woodwork projects to take care of the many offcuts that are lying around downstairs. Suggestions in the comments box please ...

Christmas really is upon us - well, it isn't but I'm out every night this week and I need to be delivering presents by the end of it. So today sees everything (apart from the home baked gifts) complete and wrapped and ready to go.

This year we have our own christmas tree for the first time - it looks amazing and I love it!! Here it is to get you in the mood: