Really October already? in It's a llittle llazy over here

Who’d have thought it. . . .

We are having our new downstairs floors put in on Wednesday. We’re having laminate through the hallway, living room and dining room and sheet vinyl in the (tiny) kitchen area. The last two weeks has been DIY chaos, with carpet having to come up, ‘feature’ fireplaces being removed and the inevitable nightmare chain of events that followed that. . .

The fireplace is removed so there’s a hole in the wall/wallpaper. So the wallpaper has to come off and the hole has to be filled. The skirting board has to be replaced because it was cut to fit the fireplace. That needs painting. The replacement wallpaper means the wallpaper needs painting. That means the other walls need painting to match the matt colour of the new wall.

The amount of extra equipment I’ve ended up having to get in the last few weeks has been silly. I now own a plastering trowel, a coping saw, a miter-box, a tenon saw, a frigging hot-air gun (because the only way of getting the blue-and-white self-adhesive vinyl tiles from hell off the original kitchen tiles was to melt them off with a 3000 watt 600 degree hairdryer), more paintbrushes than Leonardo da Vinci, a wallpaper scraper, a wallpaper seam roller, a pasting brush, a bunch of snap-off blades and a metre-long spirit level.

End result - we’re ready to go and if you squint you might even think that the chimney breast hadn’t been fixed up by a monkey with feet for hands.

We actually have a parquet wood floor in the living room, as it turns out. We never knew - it was there under the carpet all along. If we had known we’d probably have restored it and got rid of the carpets as soon as we moved in, but to be fair, there’s no underlay or insulation there at all, so we’ll be better off covering it right back up with the nice new laminate.

And then we can go back to normality for a bit. That’s us done with home improvements for a few months at least.

Other than that. . . life progresses more or less as it has done. Work’s a bit busy at the moment, but when is it ever not? My skin is behaving better, though the dust brought on a couple of flare-ups while I was ripping up and disposing of the carpet/underlay. Long may it continue.

I’d like cake now. Can I have cake now?

Also. . . llamas. You know it makes sense.