Getting Plastered

I love that pun and will never tire of it.

I have ceilings! Two of my bedrooms now have nice, flat, plastered ceilings, sound insulation has been installed on the party wall of what will be the games room, and that and the knackered wall in the main bedroom have been skimmed.

This is a pretty major milestone on the road from transforming my wreck of a house from a building site to something you can comfortably live in. Funny that months of chipping paint, paper and sometimes plaster off walls is followed by a far more dramatic change that takes five tea-breaks. And one of those was after they’d finished working yesterday. It just goes to show what a difference it makes having skilled, hard-working professionals on a job rather than feckless, disillusioned incompetents (ie. me). Anyway, once the plaster’s dry I can start making use of the stuff that was bought to decorate the rooms in a fit of unwarranted enthusiasm last October. Then I’ll have a bedroom with a carpet that’s stuck down (with underlay!) and walls that don’t cover me with pale pink dust every time I brush against them. Hurrah!

It also showed the difference between the plasterers’ jobs and mine. They spend their working lives going into the homes of, and interacting with, people they’ve never before met. I thought I was quite brave to walk upstairs and ask if they’d like tea, rather than waiting to organise a “coincidental” meeting in the neutral zone of the kitchen or hall. My job of sitting at home, by myself, staring at a computer and maybe talking to someone I work with once per week (and maybe the odd email, here or there) suits my peculiarities down to the ground and keeps me exactly in my comfort zone. Which is, I think, exactly what I shouldn’t be doing.

But somebody has to think of ways to check if all of the items in a list that they don’t know the contents of have been entered into boxes, don’t they?

They thanked me for the tea.