Post Holiday Blues

Jon enjoying some time away from the house (I think)

Long delay in posting as we have actually been away! We took a cheeky little long weekend in Biarritz (super cheap flights from Bristol) to try and improve our surfing, but mainly to just have a break and stuff ourselves with bread, wine and cheese.

Coming back to the house after a few days away I had this illogical notion that we would open the door and things would have changed, magical elves would have miraculously moved the project forward in our absence.

It was exactly as we had left it. Very depressing.

Unfortunately that’s the reality of doing all the work on the house ourselves. If we are not working on it, nothing gets done.

So what did we get back to…

Jon is still removing earth from the kitchen and dining room floor. It’s a big job and thoroughly unrewarding. Also slightly concerning is how damp the earth is, we have a lot of work to do to ensure it’s well drained and ventilated moving forward.

Removing so much earth requires numerous trips to the tip, so we continue to alternate our visits, with Jon removing my car's gold Fortune Cat (tat that I got from a shoot in Vietnam, Jon has a matching one in his van) when he goes, as he thinks this might fool the attendants into thinking it’s two different cars. I think they just don’t actually care.

When we arrived at the house, Jon set me my next task, which was even less enthralling than wallpaper stripping if that were possible. I was to remove all the nails from the wooden stud wall frames, some of which are still in place, which Jon hopes to reuse. I thought to myself ‘well that won’t take long’. However I hadn’t previously taken stock of the wood in question. Each piece (do you call them pieces?!) of wood was covered in nails. Two inches apart for the entire length and on two sides. This was apparently how the lath (of the lath and plaster finish) was attached, just by shit-loads of nails!

I mentally calculated how long this would take and came to a figure of about a day which depressed me, but actually once I got stuck in and got a rhythm going with the pry bar, I soon became more efficient. I don’t really mind monotonous tasks like that as I just put a podcast on (‘Guilty Feminist’ or ‘My Dad Wrote a Porno’ are my faves) and mentally switch off whilst I work.

An hour in and Jon came up to see how I was doing. I was secretly a little proud of the progress I had made and the resultant discarded nails scattered across the floor, but Jon quickly burst that bubble by saying ‘you’ve missed loads’!