We made a late change of plan for today. Instead of dealing with the tedium and pain of sorting the skirting and door frames we decided we’d paint the whole room white. In no way are the walls really in any shape for paint, but hey, we thought that it might give us a better idea how much we need to fix and a little morale boost.

I started the day by working my way round the ceiling filling and sanding as required. It turned out all the bits I’d try to make nicer with polyfilla yesterday now looked loads worse and weren’t nearly smooth enough. Nuts. I decided to let these go and just curse any guest that dares comment on them in the future.

After filling what felt like a million pin size holes we got the paint brushes out and decided to cut the edges with some white paint. It was certainly rewarding to see bits of the horid orange paint drift away.

Cutting

While this dried we ventured out in search of festive spirit at the Scandinavian Christmas Market. This market was awesome, we’d been last year and this time it was far bigger with more guests and more stalls. After meeting some Siberian Huskies and getting a cuddle from a Moomin I proceeded to purchase an obscene amount of swedish pic’n’mix (it’s good, the sour sweets are tastier than ours).

Huskies

We wandered home via the Night Market in Canada Water Plaza. This is a new monthly event of street food bringing some life into a rather neglected square. There were tons of cool food options there, I tried some meatballs from a place called Meatheads and a tornado chip. Donna stocked up on locally brewed ale from the nice guys at Phox & co.

Night Market

Reluctantly we headed home for more painting, both commenting on how nice it was to escape the 4 walls we had spend so much time within. On reflection, we had been starting to go a bit crazy. Who would have thought staring at the edges of a room for 10 hours a day every day for a week would do weird things to you? I’m reaching the point where I’m looking forward to staring at a monitor again.

Once home it was time to get the rollers out and try conceal that orange. I manned the mini-roller, trying to justify it as a more precise tool, whilst Donna rocked the full size one, the more tiring option. Slowly the orange became more of a salmon-pink.

First Coat

After a first coat we decided to let it dry whilst we had a meal break and then go back for a second coat after food. We needn’t have had any concerns about the paint drying in time: the takeaway curry we ordered took a stomach-rumbling 2 hours to arrive. Looks like we’re going to have to find a new favourite curry house.

After filling our anxious stomachs we headed back into the room for round 2. Donna had got started on this before me (while I fannied around on my computer) and I was delighted to see walls now starting to look a real white. An hour more of rolling and we were done.

Second Coat

We’re now at a point where our week of DIY is coming to an end. The project however is firmly in the middle so we’ll be juggling it with work for a bit so we can have it ready for the new carpet delivery. Tense times.

Plan for tomorrow is:

  • Get filling and caulking the door frames
  • Chill!
  • Revert from DIY mindset to work one