Easter Weekend

We have spent most of this weekend sat on the patio enjoying the wonderful weather.  Despite this we managed to get our bedroom ceiling skimmed and it and the walls sanded down.  It is starting to look okay.

Sanding down the ceiling proved to be a messy business though:

Now we have to fill the cracks in the ceiling with flexible filler, sand down and paint the woodwork and then paint the ceiling and walls.  I say we but what I really mean is that Kate will do the vast majority of the work (despite having injured herself falling over after lunch in Yo! Sushi on Saturday) while I bravely make tea.

We had visitors for Sunday Lunch, which gave a welcome break from the DIY and an excuse to laze about in the garden all afternoon.  Our friends Mark and Kerry who brought with them as a housewarming present a USB Barcode scanner.  No more having to type the ISBN numbers in by hand:

Decorating

Kate asked me to fill the cracks in the ceiling as part of the work she is doing to decorate our bedroom in our new house (we have been sleeping in the spare bedroom since we moved in).  On reflection it may have been a mistake to leave me to it.  The ceiling while not actually Artex'ed was covered in a thick layer of bobbly paint (about 1mm).  Sanding down and digging out the cracks in preparation to filling them with flexible filler left smooth lines in this paint.  I managed to get halfway across the ceiling before the inevitable happened and a large flake of paint just fell off.  Of course, I compounded this by poking at it and before I realised it I had a patch of bare ceiling about a foot in diameter!  It was at this point that I realised that it would have been a good time to involve Kate about 10 minutes ago.  After inspecting the damage Kate informed me that the choices were to either try and match it or remove the rest of the paint.  Well, I wasn't happy about the smooth lines or the bobbly surface and it seemed to come off easily enough...

After two nights of hard scraping I had managed to clear about one third of the ceiling.
I also came to the conclusion that I was not the first Idiot to do this as when carefully lifting a patch of paint (and it mostly came off cleanly) I found scrape marks that I had not made, frequently continuing on under paint that I had yet to remove.
Today, Sunday, Kate and I set to and spend most of the day (with occasional rest periods in the sunshine) scraping at the ceiling and we've almost finished removing the paint.

 Mostly done but guess what I am doing tomorrow night!

While we were having lunch I saw a heron sitting on out next door but one neighbours TV aerial: