Merry Christmas?

I'm not so sure this year. It just hasn't felt like Christmas at all, despite the endless snow. It's the first year in a long time I haven't spent two weeks working solidly over Christmas - I was on night shift instead for three days. Coupled with the lack of decorations in my house due to the ongoing, er, decorating, there was a distinct lack of festive spirit.

I won't expatiate on Christmas day, it involved driving home from work in the morning, opening a couple of presents, sanding the bedroom doors, sleeping through the day and going to work again in the evening.

Boxing Day started off a little more exciting with the good intentions of going for a ride. It was a daring plan considering the still hazardous icy conditions on the roads. It's possibly my shortest ride ever and was brought to an abrupt halt at the end of my street with a loud "thunk". At least I think it was a thunk; it's that noise you and your bike make as you go from upright to horizontal in the space of a nanosecond, that strange clinking/thud sound, a "thunk". So it was back to the house for more DIY.

No work tonight so I hit the DIY hard all day. Well, at least until I set the carpet on fire with the paint stripper; I read somewhere once that in terms of driving and performing manual tasks, being awake for 24 hours has the same affect on thought processes and reaction times as being twice over the legal drink/drive limit. I can with some authority now say that that is indeed true. I put the tools away.

Glass of wine and a very early night for me...

Plumbers Squashed!

This was the scene in my bathroom the other night. It wasn't pretty. All I can say is, it's a bloody good job they'd decided the bath needed to be raised or I might have an accidental permanent resident by now! (Sorry Mark ;-)

To be fair, everybody put in a fantastic few days work - electricians, plumbers and poor old Paul, who used to be the plasterer but has now turned into a builder, chippy, painter and tea boy. It's funny to think that if I wasn't a mountain biker, none of this would be happening; I'd never have met Paul at Mountain Mayhem and would never have taken on such a renovation project without his help, advice and contacts.

So after some longs days, a lot of hard work and a fair amount of head scratching, things are moving along nicely. With any luck it should be finished within a few weeks and then I can sit back and relax for a bit. Well, actually, when I say 'sit back and relax' what I actually mean is instead of spending every spare minute doing DIY, I should actually be able to find time to ride my bike, socialise, have some adventures, tidy up the website and get on with the little project I'm doing next year - in between ridiculously long working days.

Actually, I might stretch the DIY out a bit longer - it sounds much easier than doing the other stuff!

This week, I 'ave mostly...

... been demolishing my bathroom:


To this:



No, I'm not making an en-suite, but I am making it bigger. Fortunately Paul Davis was here to help - though why he wouldn't let me loose on the wall with a huge hammer I don't know! (Secretly I think he was really enjoying it, I mean how often do you just get to totally demolish something and take out all your aggression using a really big hammer without any consequences?)

Also rather fortunately, Paul is an excellent plasterer. After the initial hiccup of cutting off a large cast-iron pipe in the middle of the new bathroom, to find that the tap had stopped working many years ago and I had a lovely trickling water feature in the middle of the room (with nothing but my beautiful, brand new kitchen ceiling and halogen spotlights stopping the water dripping right through to the new kitchen), the walls were knocked out, new walls built and Paul set about plastering the whole room.

I still don't have a bathroom, that's being done next week. But I do have a larger, newly plastered room. I now have to go out and buy all of the things that constitute a bathroom, and that is a very, very, long list. Somehow I have to do this whilst working double shifts every day next week. I feel some serious internet shopping coming on... to be continued...

The New Regime

Things never go as planned do they? Originally I'd planned to kick off another "30 in 30" at the start of September using the momentum from my holiday - adding in a healthy eating plan, some weight loss and cutting back on my alcohol intake.

Obviously, the start to this was delayed due to various DIY set backs with my house again: the boiler still isn't working (that's 5 weeks without hot water); I've changed the upstairs plan and can't find lights so the electrician has been postponed; my hoover has broken and to top it all off now a fuse has blown in the fuse board so I don't have any downstairs lighting (just as the nights are drawing in). Owning a house really sucks sometimes.

So there was no time for riding on Monday and Tuesday but finally yesterday I managed to squeeze in my first ride and start my Autumn "30 in 30". And boy oh boy, is it Autumn! The first 10 minutes of the ride were met with strong winds and a heavy shower. It's very unusual for me to actually start a ride in the rain, I normally wait until it stops. So this shows a new found tenacity and enthusiasm for riding that I haven't had for some time. (It's also a good start to what could be a very wet and miserable winter.)

So, Day 1 - 1hr45m, 25 miles.
I think I might also start keeping a mileage and hours ridden log, just for a bit of motivation...

Satisfaction

I like DIY because there's always a real sense of satisfaction, a sense of pride in your work, a feeling of instant gratification and noticeable results; the feeling that all the hard work you've just put in has all been worthwhile and time well spent.

Today was a DIY day and in honour of Joolze Dymond's birthday, I have named my pantry after her. Dymond's Pantry: Before and After. (After hours of filling, sanding and painting.)



You see! A job well done and a day well spent!

Trying to be a bad day

Still buzzing from Sundays surprise podium place, Monday was a day off to relax and enjoy the sunshine. Or so I thought. My mobile phone had been covered in coffee Sunday morning and had stopped working. It had been on the radiator all night in an attempt to dry it out. It still wasn't working and my mobile phone company were less than helpful. I tried to check the internet for tips to sort out the problem, my internet connection was down as well.

I made myself a cup of tea and a good breakfast and settled on the sofa to watch a bit of daytime TV - my digital receiver had packed up. This was a technological conspiracy. I know I rely on my mobile phone a lot, but this was getting ridiculous - my mobile phone breaks and the rest of my house throws a hissy fit.

So, DTT box unplugged I set to work on the internet connection. Some fiddling and frantic searching for long forgotten passwords and it was up and running. Yes! My website was down. No! More internet faffing with passwords and the website was back up. Yes! Technology 2, me 1. No! I was still losing the war against the machines.

I went to do something more basic that didn't involve anything with a chip in it - a bit of DIY. I started assembling the flat pack set of drawers for my bedroom. After rounding off the ends of two Philips screwdrivers, one of which was an electric one, I was reduced to assembling the furniture with a freebie multitool from the front of an issue of MBUK magazine! My hand was getting sore and sweaty and as I put pressure on one particularly tough screw I slipped and a flathead screwdriver on the other side of the multitool went into my palm! I jumped back in shock and banged my head on the corner of the chimney breast.

It was definitely not my day. Inanimate object 1, me 0. Time to quit while I still had some dignity and drown my inadequacies in the bottom of a large wine glass. It was at this point that trusty, reliable humans stepped in to save the day.

I received an email from an old university friend, Niall Varley, who'd googled me and found this website. I haven't heard from him for at least 5 years, but hopefully we'll get to meet up in Ireland when I'm there in May. Maybe technology isn't all that bad after all. Then some great news I'd been waiting for from another friend in Canada. I'm not going to say too much about that just yet, it'll be a surprise! But I am very, very excited. I went to bed happy (with a throbbing head and sore hand, you can't have everything I suppose.)

Happy Anniversary!

There's been a flurry of activity down here over the last few days finishing off some bits of DIY in a vain attempt to stop my house looking like a building site/laundry room. It's been a whole year since I bought my first house and I had big ideas of what I wanted to do and how long it should take.

A year of racing, travelling, holidaying and generally faffing about somehow got in the way, as well as an enforced 'do nothing' couple of months when I had a chest infection. (This cunningly came right at the point where everything was waiting to be sanded or stripped - the very things that had caused the chest infection in the first place!) So everything just sat, static without progression, just waiting to be prepped for it's final stage of decoration.

By the time I was well enough to start again, I couldn't be bothered. The motivation had gone. Realising that excusing the state of my house with the line "I've only been in a couple of months" was starting to wear a little thin, as well as becoming rapidly untrue, I decided to get on with all those fiddly little jobs.

So, in April 2007 my list of jobs consisted of:
1) decorate master bedroom
2) fit new kitchen and decorate
3) extend bathroom and fit new bathroom suite
4) decorate second bedroom for visitors
5) do the garden

Right now, my list of jobs consists of (and this is massively abbreviated and generalised because somehow every time I finish a job I create 3 news ones!):
1) Finish decorating master bedroom and paint door and door frame. Patch up scrapes etc
2) Finish painting kitchen, woodwork and fit new door etc
3) Get carpet for second bedroom, finish decorating.
4) Start bathroom
5) Stare hopelessly at the massive task that is going to be keeping the garden under control again this summer whilst racing, travelling, holidaying and generally faffing about.

Hmm, best laid plans and all that. I think I'll just open another bottle of champagne to celebrate the fact that I actually managed to get a mortgage and buy a house - which doesn't seem to be that easy these days - and continue to write my enormous and ever-growing list of jobs to do.

Paintbrushgirl.com

That's what I'm changing the name of this website to. Why? Because for the last two weeks that's all I've done - the fence, the shed, the spare room walls, the ceiling, skirting boards, doors, architraves, the kitchen. You name it, I've probably painted it. And I haven't ridden my bike once! The closest I've got to bikes is sorting out the shed.

So I'm looking at this as my off season bit. Hopefully by the end of today I'll have a fully functioning kitchen. Hurray! Five months without one was starting to get a little annoying. And by the end of next week I should have a finished spare room and a house that is easily liveable, which means my goals for the year have been accomplished. I can put away all the DIY tools in the revamped workshop/shed, and get out on my bike and go exploring again.

I can't tell you how excited I am to finally be getting these things finished, this house stuff really has dragged on! My fault for going away so much this summer I supppose, you can't have your cake and eat it as they say. Mmmmm, cake...