Roller Girl

So who was doing all the painting, you ask?

Rex came round to help again and set to work with paint and a roller

working with incredible speed she got the walls nicely coated with wood primer undercoat in record time

and meanwhile Lorna painted all the metal beams with black Hammerite

and the door with primer undercoat.

Before long we could begin to see how the room is going to look when it's finished. The end is in sight...

Boxing Day

The next thing on the list was to finish the metal boxing in of the porthole, and also create a little box/inset shelf in the wall, in the space above the porthole. Unfortunately this also meant taking the wall off, just when we thought we'd seen the last of all that insulation and battening. Lorna prepared the pieces of steel we were going to weld in

while i removed the wall panel

then Lorna welded in the side pieces of the boxing in for the porthole


and i made a box and attached it to the back of the panel.


Once the panel was back up and the holes filled


and sanded smooth

it was all ready for painting.

Fill me up

Sadly, we couldn't keep the room looking nice, as there was work to do. The plywood boards went on pretty well but there were still seams that needed sanding and a lot of screw holes that needed filling.

We made up a mixture of wood glue and sawdust

and filled in all the holes

before sanding them smooth, nicely filling the holes and leaving them ready to paint over.

Christmas day

The reason for the big push to get the room liveable in was that my parents were coming for Christmas and needed a place to sleep. I would have made them sleep on piles of newspaper on the floor, but Lorna insisted that they be given a real bed so we temporarily furnished the room. It was great to see it with stuff in it, looking like a proper room...