Week One hundred and three

Week beginning 20th May 2024.

Molly is on her own this week as Pete is off to Zurich for his uncle’s funeral. A sad time. Pete spent most of his summers as a child and teenager with Hugo and his aunt, Maggie in Zurich and is feeling very emotional about the journey.

After dropping Pete and his mum off for the airport, Molly is enjoying her journey home up through the different glens and past some of her favourite lochs. The landscape is always changing and beautiful. There will be no work done at Gar Bothan today as Molly is invited to join Cate and Steve for dinner. Molly appreciates having the company rather than being on her own this evening.

______________________________

It’s Tuesday and Molly is taking all the skirting down from the mezzanines and out the house. It is another very sunny warm day so she has decided to paint the skirting outside. Her first job is to paint the undercoat. To save painting both sides, Pete and Molly agreed on a system where each piece of the skirting is numbered sequentially round the room and marked so only the top and one side is painted. Molly is now writing east or west on the back of each board so she knows which mezzanine they belong to.

Molly is making good progress with painting but on a few occasions has found some of the boards not marked as planned so has to try and guess which sides to paint.

Molly now starts to paint another coat of orange paint on the inside of the polycarbonate window area in the shed then, with that job done she is caulking the gaps round the skylight window on the west mezzanine. A final wee job for the day is to do the first coat of black paint on the skirting and store all the pieces in the shed for the night.

______________________________

Molly is expecting her sister Ishbel to come later this morning and is painting the second coat of black paint on the pieces of skirting. Ishbel has arrived in time for morning coffee and Molly is telling her about all the different wee jobs she hopes to do this week, whilst Pete is away.

Ishbel is finishing off the skirting and Molly is sorting out the sleeping arrangements. Ishbel is staying the night and will be, for the first time sleeping in the house. Molly is taking a futon mattress from the shed to the west mezzanine where she will sleep for the next few days.

Molly and Ishbel are at the container to get our small sofa. Luckily the sofa is near the front of the container and they loaded it in the car without too much difficulty. It’s amazing the difference it makes moving one item out of the container. There’s a bigger gap but Molly knows that there is still a heap of stuff in there. Molly really appreciates Ishbel’s help and is pleased to create a comfortable space on the west mezzanine for her book group friends who are coming this weekend.

After a wee sit down in the newly created space Ishbel and Molly are now putting down the underlay inside the storage space on the west mezzanine. They are now cutting OSB into three sections to floor this space.

______________________________

It’s Thursday already and the weather has changed to rain and it’s heavy rain. It is good because the ground needs a good soaking after several hot days. Molly and Ishbel are carrying the skirting into the house between the showers. As they work out where each piece needs to go, they discover that a few of them are not painted the right way round and Molly also missed a couple of the small pieces at the top of the stair. Ishbel is now painting these few bits of skirting and Molly is working out her plan for the gaps under the stair.

Molly is cutting the plywood into triangles to fit each gap under the stairs, with a plan to paint them to look like the plaster on the walls. It is all a bit of an experiment but hopefully it will work and look good. Cate and Steve pop round for water and a coffee so the next hour or so is spent enjoying some good chat.

Ishbel is touching up the bits on the downstair skirting, another of the various wee jobs Molly has in her list. She is painting the corners that needed filling in and the pin holes using the black paint.

Ishbel is heading off home now and has offered to take the bags of docking leaves to the dump as she needs to go shopping in Oban. Molly is delighted to get rid of them and knows that there will be plenty more in the coming days or weeks. It was lovely having her here helping and to spend a nice evening catching up.

Molly is now painting the triangle pieces of plywood and calling it a day.

______________________________

Molly is bringing the plywood triangles into the house to do the second coat of paint. This is so she can try and match the colour to the plaster. Although it is not quite right, she thinks that with a few more coats of paint it will blend in better. She leaves them to dry and is now glazing the various recessed areas or nooks. This will hopefully help to protect them as they will be used to store a variety of objects and will probably get a bit of a bashing.

Molly is now touching up some of the scuff marks that have appeared on the bathroom walls. Most likely from the different other jobs that have been done in these spaces since the rooms were painted. It’s nice to see everything looking a bit sharper in time for guests coming this weekend. A wee lick of paint makes a massive difference.

After cleaning up all the paint brushes and equipment Molly has looked out some vegetables and noodles to prepare tonight’s dinner and get ready for our friend Nicky who will be spending the weekend at Gar Bothan. Molly’s cousins, Isobel and Katriona have arrived for a visit and it’s lovely to see them and catch up. Katriona hasn’t seen the house for a while and this is Isobel’s first visit. They are very impressed with the progress.

It’s now time to put all the tools away as there will be no work this weekend. Instead it’s going to be a weekend of entertainment. Bring it on.