Plastering Day.

The weather has been lovely today, lots of sun and it turned quite warm in the afternoon.

We were up early both of us walking before the 7.00 alarm had a chance to ring. I am a morning person anyway but recently poor sleeping has led to me sleeping in a bit longer in the mornings. Today we had time for  a civilised wake up which for me is a mug of tea followed by two more mugs of coffee. The plasterers turned up at 8.00 as promised but straight away there was a set back. Four of the bags of plaster which were meant to be bonding coat plaster were board coat plaster. I thought that was another of my mistakes but when we looked at the delivery note I had ordered the correct plaster. As this was the plaster needed for the first coat Peter and the boss plasterer drove into to town to change the bags. There were four plasterers in all and I spent most of the day making cups of tea and coffee, sausage sandwiches and in the afternoon I baked a chocolate cake. I did have a little bit of an ulterior motive as I then was able to ask them to bring down the garden table. They did a very good job of plastering the walls and ceilings of the upstairs corridor though at the moment it looks a bit grim because the plaster is dark brown. Even with all the dust sheets I put down there was a lot of mess. They did their best to clean up but builders' tidy is not the same as even my standards. To be fair I had told them that the carpet upstairs is going to be thrown out. We did some extra hovering and laid a trail of newspaper to walk on but I think that carpet will have to be got rid of sooner rather than later. The extra care I took in protecting the new carpet on the stairs and downstairs hall paid off as the new carpet didn't have any mess on at all. As well as the heavy plastic tablecloths I had used a couple of lightweight plastic tablecloths, the sort that have a flock backing. The backing worked like Velcro on the carpet underneath so that the tablecloths didn't move an inch and there was no chance of anyone slipping.

In the afternoon I had a delivery of a beautiful bouquet  of flowers from Vytas (it's Mothers' Day tomorrow) and the postman brought a card from Romas.

I went into the sitting room to send the boys messages on Facebook and to my horror there were these white marks on the carpet. I tried unsuccessfully to wipe the marks off and was wondering if somehow I had tracked in some of the bleach that I use in the bathroom. There was also a pink mark which I thought was some of the plaster. I was beginning to panic when suddenly I realised that the marks were sunlight being reflected in through the window. The pink mark was from the sunlight reflecting off a pink orchid that sits in the window. Great sigh of relief.