That's a great 17th century proverb; it means that talking gets nothing done, no matter how good your rhetoric might be. In my case it means that writing blog posts has had to take a back seat to more practical problems over the last four months. When I retired I imagined I'd have so much free time that writing regular blog posts would be easy. Then reality bites and this is my first post for four months.
Home Improvement
Anyone working and commuting five days a week knows that the weekend is the only time to catch up with maintenance around the house or in the garden. You do the regular tasks like mowing the lawn or staining the fence panels and the break/fix DIY things that come up along the way. Occasionally you take on a bigger project like re-decorating a room or making some kind of alteration, perhaps taking some annual leave to do so. That was certainly our routine for many years, but I don't ever remember the frustration I've felt this year. It's felt like painting the Forth Bridge at times - spending time on something only to have to re-do it weeks later or, worse, it soon becoming redundant because something else happens.
Last year I spent a number of weeks decorating the annexe where my Mum lived. Some rooms needed updating, other parts were just differences in her taste to ours. Across four rooms I did minor repairs to walls or ceilings and completely redecorated the hallway, including sanding all six doors down to apply knotting solution, priming and re-painting. It took a while.
What we didn't know was that strips of felt on the flat roof above the annexe had come unglued, probably during the heatwaves of recent years. All those named winter storms were blowing rainwater under those flaps onto the boards. Just before Christmas that water decided to come inside to keep warm, via the ceiling.
The entire roof boards had to be replaced, along with the insulation which was updated to the current regulations. We decided to spend the extra for a modern surface with a longer life span (up to 40 years) also providing UV protection and a greater insulation generally. Expensive, but worth it in the longer term: it stays warm in the winter and cooler during our current heatwave. All good then, except that with all the walking and hammering on the joists 78 pieces of plaster dropped out of the ceiling in the rooms I'd already decorated...
On the positive side, I'm now pretty good at mixing up and smoothly applying EasiFill 60 with minimal sanding afterwards! Filling, priming and redecorating where it had only been done 5 months earlier wasn't ideal though.
Dodgy Boiler
The boiler in our house was at least 20 years old; it'd been repaired so many times in the last few years it was like Trigger's broom. British Gas were going to put up the cost of HomeCare maintenance so it was cheaper to get them to replace it with a modern and more efficient model. Besides, it was an old gravity fed system that would benefit from being updated to a pressurised system boiler. The only problem was that twelve of our radiators had isolation valves at each end, not advisable on a pressurised system. So all 24 of them had to be replaced with straight couplings. Being an old house, in some rooms the pipes were very close to the skirting boards and almost impossible for a blowtorch to be used without charring the boards. Not a huge problem, just a repaint of the skirting, but guess which rooms? Yep, the ones I'd already done twice.
Summertime and the Livins... Easy?
One of the first tasks I ticked off my list after retiring was to paint our summer house at the bottom of the garden. It was there when we moved in but we've hardly had time to enjoy it before retirement. I was looking forward to sitting down there in the summer and doing some art. At the beginning of the year we noticed that it was sagging in the corner but we couldn't see why as it had been installed butted up tight against a dwarf wall on the patio. Through the winter this gradually got worse, to the extent that I had to put acrow props in to support the roof in that corner until we had time to look at it.
Today we had to take it down as access to prop and repair it was impossible because of the wall. The problem was then obvious - the concrete screed it was placed on isn't level and no weep holes had been drilled through the wall. Thanks to climate change the far greater amount of rainwater we now get had been pooling in that corner, above the membrane. So now that needs to be done properly before we think about a new summer house.
Painting the Forth Bridge
I don't want to bore you, so I've only summarised a couple of the pieces of work we've had to have done so far this year. It's often felt like every time we update something apparently simple it turns out to be far more time consuming - and expensive - than we expected. If there's a moral to the story, it's this: doing a job properly might take longer and cost more but it'll be worth it in the long run.
Anyway this is why I haven't been a better blogger or shared more artwork lately. Lots of things on my To-Do list should have been started by now so it's going to be another busy six months.
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