so... very.... tired.....

So we finally got into the house, I picked up the keys on Friday afternoon and we have spent what feels like every waking minute of the weekend there and worked VERY HARD. I cried a grand total of three times (once in the bath - it was the only place to sit!), ripped off two fingernails, ruined one pair of jeans, lost many hours of sleep and we are one room down, and five to go.

We started in the living room, we got in there at about 9 on Saturday morning and started ripping the thick yellow wallpaper (with HUGE swirly patterns) off the walls with the careless abandon of two very naive children. We were at first hugely relieved that the walls were actual walls, with actual plaster and they were not crumbling down. We discovered two layers of wallpaper, four layers of paint (yellow, pink, grey and green with little black flowers) and the hidden beast of misery that lurks underneath the happy visage of decorating.

Every room in this house is decorated with some kind of anaglypta wallpaper or lining paper, hiding untold miseries. I have found out this weekend that it's not just about pulling off the wallpaper, sanding a bit here and there and then painting with some inoffensive neutral shade of loveliness, OH NO! There is the pulling off of the wallpaper, then the sugarsoaping of every inch of the walls, then the plasting and filling of the cracks and craters, then sanding every inch of the goddamn fucking walls, paint with base coat, then, and only then can you paint ith your neutral shade of loveliness. Seriously, no one does this surely?! and if this was really what everyone had to do then someone out there could do it for a living and charge fucking huge amounts of money for it! Then I remembered - That's exactly what they do, a work colleague was recently charged £1500 for the decorating of three bedrooms, he was so pissed off with the final cost he has vowed to do it himself in future - He clearly has NO IDEA.

We bought five paint samples and tried them all out on the walls, finally chose the exact shade of cream that we liked (not too creamy, not too white, not too yellow), picked up the sample tin to discover we had decided to paint our house.... magnolia.

My parents, god bless their kind and generous souls came around on Sunday with a picnic (a PICNIC!) and lots of energy, for mine had been sucked out of me by some kind of sandpaper vampire. My mother made the executive decision that the three bedrooms will be painted on top of the wallpaper (and somewhere inside my soul, the future me who has to rip off that wallpaper is screaming)and painted the master bedroom in less than two hours (future me might be screaming but current me is bowing before her in awe). The living room meanwhile was causing me a huge headache so Glenn and I have made a decision, now he has got to grips with the concept of filling in gaps, cracks and craters (insert filthy joke here, frankly I'm too tired) I will paint the other two bedrooms and hall, stairs and landing.

We tried to talk about the kitchen but I started to cry so we had to stop.

And somewhere in all of this, the Garden Angel paid us a visit and cleared half of my garden of the waist high grass that has been cultivating; she found a wall, a flower bed and several hundred stinging nettles which she valiantly cut down. She found a rhythm that went something like - Chop with hedge trimmer, rake, chop with strimmer, rake, fix strimmer, mow with mower she has graciously bestowed on us, rake, move to next bit, begin again. That woman is heaven sent, possibly from the same place in heaven as the amazing painting mother.

Special shout out also to my father who I think is probably still there trying to fix the toilet, and also to Matt (King of the BBQ, Lord of The Flame) for spending flippin' ages trying to get the radiator off the wall so we could find another acre of wall to cause us pain and heartache. Also to Ant for coming on Sunday and making me smile, I told him we were going to knock down some of the wall upstairs and create a large cupboard to give us much needed storage space and he has suggested buying a manequin and a length of rope just to shit people up when they go in to get a towel and Ant, the more I think about it... the more attractive that suggestion is....

We were paid a visit by our new neighbours who dropped around a bottle of sherry (yeah, I know - Sherry?!) and a lovely card welcoming us, I was so touched by this I almost cried (AGAIN? ENOUGH ALREADY!).

I know it will all be worth it in the end, I know this, but right now, I'm just so damn tired, and it's only week one.