Home decorating

The only painting this weekend has been of the bannister. Brendan did a bit yesterday, and I did my bit today. We're still doing the first undercoat - if we can do an hour tomorrow evening, we should be done, I'd say. It's painfully slow. Hopefully the 2nd coat will be a bit faster. We thought we'd be finished by now, but it's not the kind of job you can stick at for hours and hours. I don't want to be all achy tomorrow. Slow and steady will get the job done - it's not bad, once you get in the zone!

I haven't touched a brush or a pencil all week, and the week ahead is hectic too. Though, I feel that once we're finished the last bits of decorating, I'll have time again for painting and drawing. We got 2 new bins (Brabantia touch-bins, very nice - not cheap, though), and our table and chairs got delivered this Saturday morning, so the main rooms are done now. I still have a bit of a mess upstairs, caused by a radiator that leaked. Kevin is due back later in the week to sort out the living room ceiling and close up the floor boards in the front bedroom. This was a bit of a setback - the heating system was losing pressure every few weeks, but Ray the plumber could not find a leak anywhere. So, he did something in the attic (I have no idea what) and adjusted the pressure up. Unfortunately, the increase in pressure made the leak worse, with the positive result that we finally found where the system was losing pressure. But the negative result was that on Monday morning, I saw water dripping on the floor in the sitting room, and when Brendan looked up (he is the clever one, who thought to look up!), there was a big stain on the ceiling. A bit of detective work, and we found the leaking radiator in my front office - it must have got a knock when the floor was laid down or when bathroom fixtures were taken in and out of that room during the tiling of the bathrooms.
The ceiling beams were quite wet and the ceiling plaster well damaged. So, Kevin will be back later this week to sort it all out. Hopefully it will be completely dry by then. Just as well we didn't have a big party planned for this weekend!