Decorating the hall is finished.

Decorating the hall is finished.

Once I recovered from the awful shock of thinking I’d lost EVERYTHING, which of course I hadn’t, it was onward and upward with the decorating. So glad I did because, as I said in the beginning, I’m very impressed with my white stairway, and how it showcases my paintings and I wanted the same for my hallway. Now that it’s finished, I think I can safely say, I’ve achieved my aim.

At the end of last year I gave away most of my larger paintings, the ones I thought were my best, to my daughters, leaving the smaller ones for me to hang here. My stairway is like a rogue’s gallery with all my portraits and my hallway is like a little bit of France with all my poppy and lavender paintings. That big green, geometric painting is one of only two paintings I have kept from when I was a teenager at Art College. I’ve noticed it has several scratches across it; in places it’s quite badly scratched and damaged. It was painted in about 1970 and it’s been hauled around the country with me ever since so some damage is not exactly surprising. I’ve never been able to retouch it because it was painted in oil and now I only use acrylic. But, one of my friends gave me a small box of oil paint for Christmas and now I’m thinking I should do a little remedial work on it.

It’s funny how when ever I get the decorating gear out of the shed, the single job planned ends up with lots of little ‘add ons’. This time the ‘add ons’ included; fixing all the little bits of loose moulding that hide the seam between floor and skirting along the hall, removing (or at least trying to) all the old paint that had accumulated along the edges of the door frames, washing down all doors and doorframes, spraying various patched of black mould spores that appeared along the wall/ ceiling join in virtually every room and then re-touching the white ceilings. The more you do, the more you see that needs doing. While I have this gynormous pot of white paint, plus brushes and paint rollers sat here on the kitchen table, I’ve noticed my kitchen walls need a quick coat of white. I need to cover the (many) splatters and sploshes of acrylic paint accidently sloshed in the wrong direction while sitting at the kitchen table doing my paintings. I really need to be more careful and aim for the canvas not the walls. Once that’s done I can definitely put the decorating stuff back in the shed for another year. Oh… one exception, I need to get some interior wood paint to paint the new hand rail on the stairs and maybe retouch a couple of the treads that are looking a bit warn. And then…… it’s DONE for at least another year. As I get older my approach to home DIY etc has changed, these days I realise the only way I can cope with all this stuff is to keep on top of it and never let it get too bad. 

Yesterday I noticed all my snowdrops are up in the garden, I’d forgotten how many spring bulbs I have and now I’m thinking, next on the list ( after shoving all the decorating gear back in the shed) must be a little light gardening. In fact I’ve even thought about starting up my gardening blog again. Yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day. The sun shone, the sky was a cloudless blue, the sea was sparkling and shimmering , the birds were singing and all was well in the world, except of course for the biting cold. If it wasn’t for the fact that the trees remain skeletal and every one dresses as if for the Antarctic, yesterday would have looked like your average mid summer day. Cold, wind and rain be gone, a little gardening is called for very soon.  I feel it calling me.