Slap of Paint

'If you had a trade, what would it be?'

Dr B and I have been painting rooms together for the last three days, which is the most quality time (and conversation) we've had since August. Our conversations usually centre around measuring things and ordering things and worrying that something might not have been done. You might notice from the picture that those white rainwater gutters are on a road to nowhere - they drain right onto the site of the new driveway rather than into an actual drain - that's the sort of thing that's been keeping me awake at night and it's the sort of thing I notice and then start conversations about. I'm a renovation bore.

'I'd be a painter and decorator' I replied. 'Except I can't hang wallpaper and I don't like ceilings or gloss paint, so I'd be quite niche - I'd just paint walls. It's a quiet job so you can hear the radio.'

Dr B tells me he'd be a joiner because you get to see the project at the beginning and end stages of a job. Personally I'm happy for him to stay working in hospitals, where he doesn't come home covered in sawdust or plaster or gloss paint. Given the shenanigans when he took the radiators off, I don't think he'll be giving up his day job anytime soon.

We've been working alongide a team of professional decorators this week; they're painting one half of the house and we're doing the other. One of them is a bit 'slapdash' with his brush, which has been annoying me for days but came to something of a head this afternoon as I noticed he'd daubed white paint on the new kitchen units whilst walking past them to wash his brushes, and not a little splash but a bloody great dollop of the stuff. 'He's got cataracts,' explained Dr B as I was scrubbing at the unit with a damp cloth. 'He's waiting for an operation.'

'I don't think he can see,' I replied. 'His white paint is all over the place.' I decided not to mention it to his boss - he's a nice old guy who brings a flask and a newspaper and I'm a sucker for these 'salt of the earth' types. 'Can't you get him fixed a bit sooner - like tomorrow?.' Dr B thought not. I'll have to watch him like a hawk.

The house has been transformed in the last few days - incredible what a splash (quite literally) of white paint can do. Every room has now had at least one coat and six rooms are totally finished. The plasterers arrived with their scaffolding to begin rendering part of the front elevation - the brown layer in the photograph is the 'scratch coat,' (more new terminology) and has to dry out before the proper render can be applied. Meanwhile the tilers have started work on the family bathroom, running short of tiles by the end of the first day and realising they'd miscalculated, which left us in a spin and saw Dr B hotfooting over to Altrincham, where the tile supplier happened to have some leftovers from a job tiling the science labs at Manchester University. Of course, this suggests that my bathroom has the air of a science laboratory. Not sure whether this is a compliment or not.