Three month update on the house

It's exactly three months since we moved in here. People tell us it looks 'lived in' - and I'm never quite sure if that's good because it feels more like a home, or not-so-good because it's getting more cluttered! Perhaps somewhere between the two.

Of course there's still a lot to do. In between guests, Richard's spending evenings turning Daniel's old cabin bed - which was fine when he was eight or nine - into one more suitable for a young man, assuming Dan returns for awhile when he's finished on the Doulos. We had managed to lose the ladder in transporting the basic bed from the UK to here, so he's built a new one and is now in the process of building an enormous desk as part of the bed. Eventually it will have shelving behind. Meanwhile I have cut and re-hemmed the curtains from Dan's room in our other house, since he liked them and there was plenty of material, to fit his room here:


In case it looks as if we're well-organised, there's still a huge pile of boxes the other side of the room, variously labelled 'Dan's books', 'Dan's clutter', 'Dan's stuff', 'Dan's junk', 'Dan's miscellaneous', etc.


Tim had hoped that we could use the curtains from his old room here too, and we tried, but there wasn't quite enough material and there was an annoying gap which let through the neighbour's side-light overnight. So we persuaded him to come to the curtain factory last week, when we needed to order curtains for the downstairs studio, and there was one kind of material (amongst hundreds) which Tim liked. So he now has new curtains, which he's very pleased with:


The guest flat downstairs, of course, still has a lot of work to do. Although our last guest left only about ten days ago, and our next ones are due this Sunday, it's once again become a general dumping ground and looks remarkably messy:


This is partly because we were hoping to have the main guest bedroom ready for this weekend, but we still haven't had the plumber or the carpenter to fix either the sink or the doorframe. Still, Richard filled about 30 holes with polyfilla last week, and we've now painted it - a similar colour to the previous one, but it looks a great deal better without white patches and holes! I've also adapted two pairs of curtains - which we had in the living room of our last house - to fit the room. They go surprisingly well, and keep it significantly cooler.


Yesterday we cleaned the downstairs bathroom ceiling, which was a bit mouldy, and Richard repainted it with mould-resistant paint. Then he and Tim started painting the studio, with the 'expensive' green paint we bought earlier in the week. Since the sound-treatment panels will be hanging on the wall, they just painted around them, meaning it looked a bit odd while being done:


But very effective when the panels were put back on their hooks: