Getting into training

I’ve got plenty of work ahead of me, both in the garden and indoors, when my house is ready. The grass is way, way overdue for cutting and although the unpredictable weather hasn’t helped, the main problem stopping me getting my ride-on mower out and doing the job has been the amount of stone that was left behind after they’d finished installing the septic tank. Some of the pieces were quite large and as I found to my cost in my old house at Plazac, if you leave them and they go through the mower blades they can do quite a bit of damage. In fact I lost two mowers for just that reason.

So the day before yesterday I spent quite a bit of time clearing away as much as I could. It took quite a bit of effort too as I had to rake the stone pieces into a heap, some of which had to be prised out of the ground as they were sticking up to just the right height to hit the mower blades, shovel them into a bucket and then carry them away to dispose of them. And after I’d done that I did a bit of essential hand landscaping to remove the worst of the humps they’d left in the ground and contour the land a bit around the tank access covers and so on.

As I’ve not done much heavy work for going on a couple of years, I’m trying to build myself up again at a reasonable speed and to not overdo it. So yesterday I took it easy with the aim of getting stuck in a bit more today, which I did in the form of rubbing down walls and ceilings inside the house ready for painting. As I’ve got a lot of preparation work and painting to do, I wanted to use today as an exercise if you like, to see how much I could get done in a given amount of time.

And I was pleasantly surprised. Starting in the late morning and working right through non-stop, except for occasional rest breaks, I got the walls and ceilings done in the whole of the living room and corridor. And this was in spite of having to use the ghastly Stanley rubbing down tool with the extension handle. In fact despite my attempts to try to prevent it, it did cause some minor damage when its stupidly designed head kept flipping over which I’ll have to go back and repair so I’d recommend to anyone reading this, avoid the wretched tool like the plague.

The amount of space that I prepared today is by far and away the largest in the whole house so the rooms that I do later will be a doddle in comparison. The living room and hall are now ready for spraying with surface sealer, a job that I’m really looking forward to doing. Beforehand, though, I have to mask up the windows and doors which I think could take some time to do properly. I think also that on the evidence of the following photo, I’ll need to acquire some more protective clothing and equipment because the items that I already have are inaccessible in my storage.

I’ve cleaned myself off a bit now but I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t somewhat knackered after I’d finished. In fact I took a little nap after which I felt much better. I’m hoping that they’ll be along very soon to lay the floor tiles in the house but one thing I’m sure is a racing certainty. We’ve got a forecast for rain the whole of this week which will mean that inevitably, as usual, they’ll be along to fit the shutters to the outside 🙁