The grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the good life fence. Sometimes it feels as though our baby steps forwards are overtaken by giant leaps backwards.
The major drama has been the nightmare of the big green monster described by Dave in “Spot the difference” with admirable restraint given the strife the malevolent tank of doom has caused him. Last week it was also my turn to be punished. Dulux, the God of decorating, has not looked kindly on my efforts to save the planet. In return for my having favoured eco-paints over the fine range of VOC paints that Dulux bestowed upon mankind, he put a curse on all our painting. The brown clay paint insists on drying in patches leaving paler stripes all around the edges, the plaster in the bathroom is on its 8th coat of undercoat and still refuses to accept it, and the big green monster in the roof widdled all over the ceiling in the bedroom below.
I was not a happy bunny last week. But pity poor Dave who spent an entire morning painting satin on the skirting board and dado we’d undercoated the previous week, only to discover that he’d been using the wrong tin the whole time and painted it all in undercoat again. If you’ve ever been on your hands and knees painting dado or skirting board you’ll know how many times he had to count to 10 and bite his lip before taking a deep breath and going back to the beginning.
But all is not lost, there have been some small victories. I completed my first furniture reclamation project by transforming a dirty, tatty and shabbily upholstered stool into a shiny, white and badly upholstered stool. Dave thinks it looks like a cake stand.
The floor in the cottage finally got its coat of varnish last week. What we didn’t know was that between coat 2 and coat 3, Stevie “Jazz Paws” Pickworth used the varnish tray as a bed, so as well as varnish the floor also got a coating of little black hairs. Damn those pesky kittens.
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