Money worries and getting stuck in

Having done a bit of adding up and thinking about our outstanding bills for windows, wiring and plumbing, we’ve realised we can only pay the builders for another 3 weeks max. This won’t cover finishing the whole house; we’re prioritising the bits we’re going to need to live there. It’s a bit of a disappointment, but no so much. We’re nearly there, and there’s a lot we can continue with ourselves, like tiling and painting.

I’ve managed to put in a couple of days at the house myself. The men still look doubtful about letting a woman do a man’s job, but at this stage, they’ll just have to lump it. I’m in a hurry to move in!

I’ve had great fun repairing walls with plaster, sanding ready for painting, polishing old floor tiles with an electric sander, and burnishing the iron banister. The latter is a very slow job, but very satisfying. Once all the old paint and rust is removed, it becomes a metallic grey-black – gorgeous. The only thing is, it’ll take about a year to do it all! We’ve got the balcony railings to do, as well at the stairs between the four floors.

There’s so much going on at the house at the moment – it’s a really exciting time. But still, it seems to be going so slowly! We want to start finishing bits, but everything takes longer than we expect. Part of the problem is the sand for the cement – it seems to take two people a good 2-3 hours to bring up a load using the hoist and a wheelbarrow. The workmen are fixing up the walls ready for plaster (where there wasn’t any before, or where the old plaster was falling off), and it’s incredible how much sand they go through.

And then all the little jobs take time. In a day and a half, all I managed to do was touch up the plaster going down to floor level on the top floor, and then sand it. This will mean we don’t have to put a wooden or tile skirting board to hide the join, we can paint a gloss skirting board as the house had before. Roscoe isn’t having any more luck. He’s been repairing the gaps where tiles are missing. Yesterday in six hours he managed to get eight of the old cement tiles in! It’s a slow job preparing them and cutting them.

Best get back to it!

PS A useful tip given to us by the spark - take photos of the exposed pipes and cable tracks before the walls are repaired. When you need access in future, you can check where they are without knocking down half the house!