Sanding

Today Dennis and the boy (Lloyd) turned up to start stripping back and repairing the upstairs floors. I was up first thing in order to pack the bed up and move it into Mirinda’s room.

The day has basically consisted of them making lots of noise while I’ve sat in the office, amid the most beautiful day of the year so far.

Tulips are appearing everywhere, making everything look delightfully colourful.

Group of tulips

Above is part of the crop that I planted in the ex-nettle bed. As the day wore on, they opened more but this was quite early.

Soft red tulip

And above is a close up of one of the light red ones. I say ‘light red’ because there’s some quite bright ones to come yet.

After lunch (spent listening to machines overhead while trying to follow the snooker) I took the poodles up to the park where we met the guy who did the recent masonry work on the castle wall. He actually works at the castle as a mason. What a great job.

He told me how much he enjoyed rebuilding the wall because he normally just fixed little bits here and there. He feels the wall is a lasting legacy to his work.

Apparently, the wall is leaning four inches at the top mainly due to tree roots growing near the base. However, while the later additions (Restoration, Georgian, Victorian) are not very good, the original bits (14th century) are still perfect. He reckons it was because the masons used better lime.

They are going to clear the trees from the moat this year, hoping to keep the wall standing a lot longer. He told me there were about 300 to cut down. We agreed, it would probably take a while to finish.

Just a bit of the ditch

It was a lovely day to be walking in the park.

Just the park

But, meanwhile back at the house…Lloyd had been going great guns. By the time they’d finished for the day, the floors look shiny and new. Well, not exactly shiny; more like new wood. This is the spare room from yesterday.

Spare room on Tuesday evening

More dramatic is the corridor. The carpet has gone and Lloyd sanded up to where the wood needs a lot of repair.

That’s not a shadow on the left

Tomorrow, Dennis is going to patch up all the messy bits prior to staining it.

It looks like the job will last until Friday, so no work for me this week, I’m guessing.

While they finished up and when they’d gone, I started the mowing. The first mow of the year. It was pretty hard going but at least it almost looks like a lawn down the back.