October 17th - Bloody decorating …

18/10/2008 by Brigid.

Never really finished the holiday diaries, did I? Perhaps you thought I’d given up on this blog? Actually, no. We’ve just been busy.

Since the installation of double-glazing in April, work on the house had rather stalled.With the exception of last Christmas, guests have tended to arrive either singly or at very short notice, taking us as they found us, so to speak. Allowing us to get lazy. However, with the threat, or should I say ‘promise’ of our first American visitors at the beginning of October, we thought we had better smarten ourselves up a bit. If you had seen the hive of activity that preceded their arrival, you would have thought we were expecting the Royal family. Though, in reality, Karen and her son, Dave, have lived through several major construction and refurbishment projects and are no strangers to work in progress.

The original plan was simply to give the first floor ‘office’ a quick coat of paint to try to turn it from a bleak passageway into a cosy spare bedroom fit for Karen’s grand-daughter, Jessie. The problem friends had found with using a paint-roller to apply non-drip emulsion, was that the plaster was so fragile that huge chips tended to detach themselves and stick to the thick pile. Hoping, at least, for a uniform wall colour, they were left with something akin to vitiligo with acne scarring. A loaned paint gun, on the other hand, proved excellent for ‘glueing’ the damaged plaster in place and didn’t, at first, seem to create significantly more mess. In fact, I was so pleased with the results in the office, I rashly set about transforming the bathroom in the same manner.

You will have noticed the words “at first” in the last paragraph. 

At first, I was surprised how light and easy the paint gun was to handle. At first, I didn’t notice the dribbles of paint where I had accidentally lingered too long over one section of wall. At first, I didn’t mind the noise of the electric motor. And, at first, I didn’t notice the dust. Bloody dust!

When I finished painting, I came downstairs to find the kitchen table covered in a fine layer of white powder. Then I noticed it on the coffee-maker … the stairwell, the tiled floor, the carpet, the hi-fi unit, the bathroom fittings … The cats, who had been confined in our upstairs flat all day, took great delight in decorating hitherto clean items with pretty little white paw prints. John duly got out the vacuum cleaner. Bloody cats!

Apparently, what had happened was that a desicant used in quick-drying emulsion had caused some paint particles to leave the gun as dust, while the compressed air created a draught, effectively distributing it throughout the house. Bloody paint gun!

Anyway, we now had two, more or less clean, bright, and very white, rooms. A little colour was needed. The bathroom wasn’t so much of a problem, as colour is provided by the tiles and suite: busy blue and grey flowers on the walls and a blue rough-sea effect on the floor, neither of which quite go with the turquoise ceramics. The office, on the other hand, looked even bleaker than it had before we started.

I found a plaid fabric and ran up a pair of short unlined curtains for the office window. Unfortunately, due to M. Fuchs’ excellent efforts in measuring up our double-glazing for maximum light, there remains only an inch or so between the hinged windows and the top of the deep window recess. Hanging the curtains should have been a five-minute job. However, putting a proper curtain pole above the recess was not an option as a short curtain would allow in too much light, and longer curtains would get caught in the adjacent door. In the end, it took all afternoon and several trips to the droguerie before we found a dowl rod that was narrow enough to sit above the opening window, and strong enough to take the weight without sagging in the middle, and a pair of suitably small brackets to hold it all up. Bloody curtains!

So the room now contained a single bed made up to look like a sofa, a chest of drawers full of linen, a pair of cheerful plaid curtains and, somewhere under a pile of correspondence, till receipts and waste paper, John’s desk. We needed some shelves.

Actually, we had bought some earlier in the summer: a free-standing, scaffold-style unit, with which we planned to screen the staircase. The only problem was how to prevent the cats from using it as a climbing frame and tipping our books and ornaments on to the heads of unsuspecting folk as they came upstairs. Bloody cats!

We bought some plexiglass from the droguerie. It came off a roll marked largeur 0.8 and cost 11.50€ per metre. Perfect. John measured the required amount and M. Pujol expertly cut two lengths using a thing that looked like a giant guillotine. The idea was that we would use small brass screws and decorative matching cups to secure the plexiglass to the stair side of the shelves. It was only when we got home that we realised that the plexiglass was a) not 80cm wide, b) not cut straight and c) the screw cups that we had just bought did not fit any of the screws we had. Bloody plexiglass!

It wasn’t really a huge problem. It just took longer than expected. John bought some new screws and we re-cut and overlapped the two sheets of plexiglass. Not quite the crisp finish we were after, but it looked ok. Now to the desk end of the room to create a permanent home for the printer, scanner, telephone directories and computer software. We already had matching dark wood-effect shelves. We just needed brackets. So we called in at our local builders’ merchant for a heavy duty adjustable rail and bracket system to match the industrial-style scaffolding at the other end of the room.

This time we had installed the vertical rails before we noticed that we had bought the wrong brackets. Bloody shelves!

I confess, by this stage, I was beginning to lose interest. Illogically, perhaps, I became obsessed with the fact that the sofa’s bed base was still showing and, therefore, despite the addition of numerous tastefully-coordinated cushions, still looked like a bed rather than a sofa. “Bloody cushions!”, said John.

The ‘sofa’ is actually one of two, twin, beds. So, as I explained to John, I couldn’t simply make one valance. I “might as well” make two. “After all, it shouldn’t take long”, I said, hopefully. It probably wouldn’t have done, had I not lent my “Soft Furnishings for Dummies” book with John’s daughter in London. Still, after a couple of false starts, a couple of unpicked seams and a re-cut border, I worked it out in the end. The second valance was, as I had previously assured John, much quicker to put together. But then, as our Kiwi lodger, Grant, always used to say, the trick is to do the second one first. Bloody valances!

The bottom line was that the office was finished before Karen, Dave and Jessie arrived, and we were quite (in the American sense of the word) pleased with it. As it happened, 17-year old Jessie would have slept through the outbreak of WWIII, with or without curtains, if allowed to, and I am sure she wasn’t bothered if the bed base showed or whether it matched the rug.  But it was important to us, or rather, me. And that’s all that really mattered in the end. “Bloody women”, said John!

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