Family support

21 weeks. That's how long this has been going on. Sometimes it seems like longer - so much has happened in that time. But then other times when we look around a still uninhabitable house with plaster white walls, wires poking through ceilings and covered floors we think: "What the hell have we done in all that time".

That was until the seven days just gone by. Because in the last week we made more visible progress than any of the previous twenty. And it's in no small part thanks to a huge helping hand from family and friends.

Let's back up a bit. A huge, huge amount has happened during the 20 weeks before. We've spent over 100 man days in the house doing countless jobs (as you'll know if you've followed previous posts). And we've had no small amount from friends and family already in stripping wallpaper, clearing, loading skips and prepping walls, not to mention the UK parcel reception centre. Last week's family/friend visit from Romania gave us a huge timely boost.

This is how the house looked at the start of the week.

Kitchen floor finally uncovered and tiles restored! A post on dealing with the divas that are cement tiles will follow at a later date.

Covered floor and kitchen in boxes. This isn't even half of the boxes...

In short - all floors covered except the kitchen floor; all walls white; and a kitchen in IKEA boxes.

The first victim of the week was the walls.

Team paint.

Knew all that paint from the UK would come in useful somewhere...

Painted! So which room is this again? (A: dining)

In parallel to this, someone was cooking something up in the kitchen.

He's got some spirit!

Slowly coming together.

And as you may have noticed our undertaker started putting lights in place,

Then by Friday came the mammoth task of the floors. A truely hard day as we took up the paper, sanded 100m2 of parquet, (tried to) stain the top floor and got a first coat of varnish down, all in 12 hours.

Woodboy! (circular floor sander) Turns out (haha) that the secret is to use less force, not more to control it. As we found out after using all our strength to hold it and flying into the wall a few times!

Round the edges with a hand sander, then a vacuum to get rid of all the dust.

Successful stain and first coat of varnish; 1 hour between the two. 

Stain is a pain. While it looks good in the photo, there's a small problem with the stain here, it's come out strangely green. We're still to decide if we redo this room....

But the end of day result was outstanding.

We went back to put two more coats on Saturday and Sunday to get to this.

This room and the dining room were particularly painful to varnish.

Worthwhile results mind you.

Finally, just to top it off, the consumer unit finally got fitted, meaning we have proper electricity in the house (opposed to the one room at a time situation we had been stumbling through).

So massive progress, and massive thanks are due. But it's deceptively close - a lot of little ends to tie up; the stairs and hall are a mess and from the second floor up still remains a wasteland. And time is ticking...