Day 3

I met  2 friends and their babies for coffee in the morning and they updated me on their house renovations. Both of them have done/are doing very similar to us. Replastering, renovating, repainting. One friend got the entire electrics rewired. This was quite positive.

1) Succeeded in removing a large amount of wallpaper from the 3 walls in the bedroom. Still have one wall left. It is really interesting peeling off the wallpaper and seeing 2 lots of older wallpaper- some looking quite old e.g. 50s or 60s? Will photograph tomorrow.

2) There's loads of white stuff under the wallpaper. Looks like glue. I thought it was wallpaper paste but Helga then thought it was Artex and got worried as we were chipping away at it. Andy disagreed and thought it was PVA glue.

3) Meanwhile Mark was holding fort, and the carpet cleaners steam cleaned the carpets. It no longer smells as much of DOG!! Nearly getting rid of dog smell. This is very good.

4). The people we bought the house from returned today and they emptied the pond and took their carp and goldfish. They used a hose and drained it into the neighbours garden. They removed a lot more garden furniture but finally got stuck on one piece-  a table with a metal umbrella stand weight  which was rusty so they couldn't remove the metal chunk. It was so big and clunky they could not get it out of the house. In the end they left it and returned at 6pm a second time with the hope of getting it through the neighbours driveway and out into the front road, but the neighbours were out. They will return tomorrow!!! 

5) We loaded both cars with all the wooden planks from the bed unit and the fitted wardrobes. My car fitted loads but ANdy's is bigger and fitted a lot more.  Unfortyunately 10 of the cupboard doors were too big and wouldn't fit in either car, so poor Andy had to saw them in half! What a palava.

6) We drove to the Household recycling centre in convoy and unloaded all the wood into the wood recycling crate. THis was quite cathartic.

7. We ate at KFC.

8) Helga and I decided to start sorting out the lounge, entrance hall and electrics cupboard inbetween the lounge and entrance hall (at the bottom of the stairs). I scrubbed the skirting boards in the entrance hall, washed the walls, and washed the door. I washed the walls in the electric cupboard (obviously didn't touch the electric meter etc) and wiped the shelving unit in there. I mopped the floors. Helga and Mark worked in the lounge - they washed the skirting boards and walls and also took the grill off the vent in the wall - this was so disgusting (as was the one in the bedroom) that Helga soaked them in hot water.

9) Meanwhile, Andy tried to use the steamer to 'melt' the PVA glue off the wall. He succeeded in removing some off of a small section of the wall however the steamer lid got stuck and he couldn't get it off and as a consequence couldn't use the steamer. It was really annoying then because it was a design fault in the steamer and there was a bit of frustration in the air at the end of the day.

Before - after photos of bedroom