I abandoned the plastering for a day on Monday to visit my sister and my three nephews. They live close to the sea, and so we headed to the beach. 

I do love a beach, especially one with a big sky. 

We wandered through the dunes, jumped over (and over and over) a puddle, and dug a hole. All good beach activities. Oh, and I caught my first Pokemon, apparently. And we played on a pirate ship. 

I really should get over to play at the seaside more often.

Yesterday was, unsurprisingly, another day of plastering. The turn of the main stairs this time - and hopefully the last proper wall to be plastered upstairs (there are a couple of holes to fill, but nothing major).  

It's a big wall, and there was lots of faffing with ladders and dust sheets and things being at the bottom when I wanted them at the top. I had to split it into three sections, and only managed to do the first coat on two of them. I'll finish the first coat today, and then spend tomorrow putting a final coat on the whole lot. 

Last night we wanted to get away, so we headed out of town for a while in the fading evening light. 

It was peaceful up by the reservoir, and it reminded me that we should do this more often. 

Not today though, today I'm back to painting and plastering and gardening, carrying heavy things up and down stairs. Some days it feels like we're making progress, and some days I feel like we're just making things worse. But I'm keeping my list up to date so I can see that I have actually done something. 

Today I've put undercoat on the bathroom cladding, made a net curtain, been for a cuppa with a friend, and bought some screening to go round the compost bin, which I'll put up later. Right now though, I'm off to finish off that plastering on the stairs. One day we'll get there... 

It's been rather warm round here of late. I confess I haven't really made the most of it - between work and decorating I've been mostly inside. 

​We did get outside yesterday though. 

My mum was here, and we hopped down to a local festival in the park to listen to some friends playing some music. It really was most jolly, sitting in the sunshine under a tree, eating a sandwich and watching the world go by. 

I was quite taken by these giant crocheted bluebells, high up on an archway. 

We couldn't stay lazing around in the sunshine all day though - there was work to do. 

Mum had kindly offered to help with my never-ending list of tasks, and I thought it would be nice to do something in the garden, which is rather overgrown. We did some lopping and clearing and weeding, and spread a load of woodchip, which will hopefully mean No More Weeding for a while (not that I ever did that much, clearly). 

We only got as far as the bird table, which isn't very far at all, but that generated an entire car full of branches and weeds for the tip. I really don't know where it all comes from. 

​Today we're in charge of this little fella. 

He's very cute, but not particularly good at DIY. We went for a walk around the fields instead. 

On the way back, he tugged and pulled towards his own house, and so I took advantage and locked him in it for a couple of hours while I tried to sort out this mess. 

Hmm. Still, it's all properly plastered now, and I had time to do a good deal of painting (not of that wall!) before we collected our little furry pal again. 

I'm off work this week, and have many grand and ambitious plans, mostly house-related. Plastering, painting, gardening - we'll be practically a show home by the end of the week I'm sure (or not). Would you like to see a bit of bathroom progress? 

​This is how we started. 

What fun! Perhaps not appealing to all tastes in the house-buying public though... And if you look closely, you can see those pictures were stuck onto polystyrene sheets, which in quite a lot of places were coming off the walls, and the plaster behind was crumbling and falling off. 

We lived with it like this for years, but figured other people might not be quite so happy to... And anyway, I needed to practice my plastering skills, so off it all came, and we started the lengthy process of repairing the walls. 

It's not finished yet, but the walls are now (a) not crumbling and (b) relatively smooth. Hooray! 

I'm hoping to have a nice shiny TaDa! photo to share with you by the end of this week. Watch this space... 

In the meantime, me and the furry one are off for an evening stroll. 

I haven't spent much time in the garden yet this summer. My focus has been inside the house. When I look out of the windows, the garden seems like an overwhelming sea of green. 

Occasionally I pop outside, and am treated with a splash of colour and an accidental harvest. 

It always surprises me what I find. I don't think I've ever planted potatoes in this garden, and yet they grow everywhere.

The fruit is doing well. I can see quite a few raspberries, and the gooseberry bush is achingly ready to be picked - I'll do that tonight. There are actually a couple of apples growing this year. The redcurrants are slowly being picked off by a wood pigeon, who slinks guiltily away each night as I arrive home. 

My mum's coming to visit at the weekend, and I'm tempted to rope her into helping me sort it all out (sorry mum!) The garden is small, and even a couple of hours of work makes a big difference. We're cooling off here after a few days of intense (for us!) heat, and so it will be good to be outside. 

And, of course, the house needs to be presentable from the outside too....

We're still making progress inside - I'm off work next week, and by the end of it we hope to have a finished bathroom and a much-improved (although probably not finished) bedroom. Getting there... 

I don't tend to travel much. I never have done. Well, I'm on the move quite a lot, up and down the country, visiting friends and doing work-related things and going to the seaside, but I never go too far, and I very rarely go abroad. 

This is partly habit. As children our holidays mostly switched between two places in north Wales, apart from one memorable occasion when I was thirteen and we went camping in Jersey. That was the first time I'd been on a plane, and I didn't get on another one until twelve years later. Including that Jersey trip as a teenager, I've now done three out and back plane trips in my life, an average of one return trip every twelve years. I'm quite happy about this (and the environmentalist side of me wishes it was even less). 

So this trip to Norway was a bit of an adventure. I was there for work, and so I didn't have days to wander off sight-seeing, but I managed to sneak in a little bit anyway. 

I stayed in a hotel at the airport, and had a fine view of the runway, and got quite fond of watching the planes take off and land. I was there over the summer solstice - the sun set at 11pm but it never got really dark at all while I was there. 

Because the evenings were light, and the city was full of tourists, the shops were open late, and so it felt like there was an extra 'holiday' day at the end of each work day. I ambled around the streets nosing in shop windows looking for proper teabags (I did, eventually, find some - which the shopkeeper gave me for nothing as they were a year out of date). 

Bergen is a pretty place, nestled between the hills and the sea, and surrounded by a collection of tiny islands. 

One evening I got on the funicular railway to the top of the hill overlooking town, and sat for a while by a lake. 

It was peaceful there, away from the city, although there were still plenty of people wandering around. 

The trip to the top took less than ten minutes, but the walk back down, along a windy road, took well over an hour. I peeked into back gardens and enjoyed the view across the water, and even rang some people for a chat. I'm not used to being away for a week and not talking much. 

As I walked back down to the harbour the sun came out, so I sat for a while and watched the boats bobbing around and people drinking and wandering. 

It rained rather a lot while I was there, which was a shame, as I'm told it was rather sunny back home. But, we must remember, I was there to work, after all...

Still, there were moments of sunshine, and plenty of snippets of time to enjoy them. 

I'm so unused to plane travel that on both the way out and back again I sat glued with my face to the window. Other people were reading their books, looking at screens, even snoozing, and seemed almost oblivious to the fact that we were, quite miraculously, actually flying. 

I'm home again now, of course, and there's a small part of me that can't quite believe there are whole other countries where people are carrying on their daily business in much the same that we do (and plenty of other different ways, of course). I feel a little like my youngest nephew, who was astonished recently to find that the people on the television actually knew it was Sunday.

Life back on the ground is miraculous in its own quiet way. There's a goldfinch singing on the telephone wire outside. This morning I picked a single perfect strawberry from the garden. At the local tip I met a man throwing away a pile of boxes after a recent house move - fortunately I caught him before they went into the skip. Slowly, and I know I say this often), things are coming together. 

I've started a new page on this blog to keep track of the progress we're making on the house - look up at the top right to find it. More before and after pictures coming soon... 

You'd be forgiven for thinking we'd abandoned the house lately, in favour of running, jet-setting, and contemplating the state of the garden. Fortunately, you'd be wrong, and there has actually been some small amount of progress. 

My current project is the area by the bed. This is because, while this is in such disarray, we're sleeping in the attic. Which is fine, and is where we normally make our guests sleep, but I'm really quite keen to get back into the real bed. This is how we started a few weeks ago. 

Hmm. At this point the ceiling had been plastered (by a professional plasterer, not me), but the plaster on the chimney breast and wall was coming off, and the wall to the right was never plastered at all - we'd put a large piece of fabric over the whole lot and ignored it. That purple fabric is what the headboard was resting on, and disguises where all the bits of plasterboard meet. 

Old plaster stripped, new plaster applied (that white stuff is PVA, waiting for a final coat of plaster). Looking slightly better already! 

Plastering all done, and can you see that cladding on the wall? That's Peter's project - I just can't reach to plaster that wall, and with the real plasterer busy for months, this seemed the best option. Not sure it's the easiest option, mind you... 

This week I've been painting. Two watered-down 'mist coats' followed by a top coat of white. It's starting to look like a room again now. 

Most of my pictures from today have been taken while sitting down, drinking tea. I do a lot of that. Sometimes the tea-drinking takes longer than the decorating (which might explain a few things). Today I had to sit down, because I had to ponder a few things - mostly how on earth I was going to paint that bit, over there, right over that big drop. 

Nothing's ever easy when it comes to DIY, is it? You'll be pleased to know that I did actually manage it, with the aid of a paint pad, a long stick, and a good deal of clinging on to that upright beam. I spent some time on the platform opposite too, and also a considerable amount of time trying to get off the platform again - precarious balancing is all very well going up, but not quite so straightforward coming back down. Fortunately, a friend's super-long ladder (which we already had in the house, we didn't have to ring for help) proved most useful. 

Tonight I'll paint primer on the cladding (which doesn't involve any leaning or clambering or stretching, thank goodness). Tomorrow I'll have to do all my hanging and leaning and clambering again for the second coat, and again one evening for the third. Tonight I'll also remove everything from the bathroom, ready to plaster the walls, hopefully tomorrow. 

​Slowly, were getting there. 

In the meantime, I've made some jam. 

I was slightly alarmed on returning from Norway to find that my gooseberries are almost ripe. Eek! I still had a box in the freezer from last year that I'd been meaning to do something with but never quite got round to. Of course I let them defrost before I snipped the ends off, and then it was almost impossible to do without scissors, but we got there eventually. 

There was also a box of redcurrants, which I never quite know what to do with. This time came to the rescue, with a recipe which I largely ignored other than the bit which said 'there's no need to go through the tedious business of stripping the currants from the stalks'. Sounds like my kind of recipe - so I gleefully threw them all in a pan (without weighing them), together with 'some' sugar (again, no weighing). 

The result is a not-quite-set-but-a-bit-gloopy sauce, which is a beautiful colour, and is now residing in the fridge until I figure out what to do with it. In the meantime, this year's redcurrants are ripening menacingly in the garden...