Still rolling…

Still rolling here, more or less. The second pair of socks for UFO-bashing has reached the second toe despite having to give time to more pressing matters yesterday. Hopefully I’ll have them grafted some time today and then return to the patchwork shawl, with my fully functioning glasses to hand.

We are carpeting a large section of the house over the next few weeks. The rear hallway, playroom, and putative train room are boarded out with softwood boards. These do not mix well with our furry complement and their claws. We elected to cover them with carpet and thought we would go for carpet tiles.

Short investigation revealed that we cannot lay carpet on top of the boards and that the boards need to come up. They are not real suspended floorboards, just some tongue and groove loose-laid over a floated concrete floor. Not so very bad, apart from the fact that they were laid under the skirting boards and architraves.

Quite a lot of work to be done then. And that’s before pointing out that this is the optimum time to do some wall-painting!

We managed to find some cheap Heuga contract tiles on eBay. We even managed to find a carrier to get them to us. We bought them as Seconds quality, and there were 12 boxes, we only need 9. All should be well…

Last night we broke out the boxes and inspected the tiles, sorting theminto “good” seconds and “bad” seconds. It soon became clear that what we had here were Rejects and not graded Seconds quality. Perhaps not the bargain that we had originally thought. For a while things were very worrying indeed, until we came to three straight boxes of “goods.” The final count is something like 7 full boxes plus 5 tiles of “good” tiles that can be laid front and centre. The “bad” tiles range from totally unusable to highly obvious face faults that can be cut off to leave half a usable tile or more. The plan is to never cut a tile from the good boxes and to seek out a tile from the bad pile for cutting. It all ought to work out OK but I’ll reserve judgement until we are done.

These are the tiles: Chenille Warp in flashback – we supposedly got > £1,400 value (had they been perfects) for under £300, delivered. I hope that it all works out OK…

I got paint chips when I went to town on Thursday and today we will choose a nice pale sage green for the hall wall. My other task for today is to empty the bookcases, dust the books, and store them away in boxes (boxes which I do not have). Mr L will start to lift floorboards in the train room. I’m going to make him a very naughty dessert as compensation – white chocolate torte, with raspberries. Local readers are invited to pop in for a slice :-)   (after all, they have Mars Bars etc. to collect.)

Blog service may be patchy during this DIY period.