Just a quick update before I stagger off to bed – we’ve been at the house or out and about doing housey things from 9 this morning through till 8 or so tonight, so you can imagine the state of me. I don’t have terribly much to show for it – the bedroom is now mopped and half-scrubbed, but there’s some clarity on some stuff and some confusion on others.

Progress:

• The plumber came and installed the boiler. He’ll be back later in the week to fit the bathroom stuff and do the tiling (he’s a multi-skilled plumber)
• The electrician is nearly done – he’s installed the bathroom fan (just astoundingly quiet! worth every penny paid for it), we have lights in all rooms upstairs and he’s just finishing off the final circuit which is for the stairway lights
• BT came by today and hooked us up with a telephone line and… wait for it… fibre optic internet!! Yes, we have internet and we haven’t even moved in yet! Our previous three moving experiences each saw us without internet for about 6 weeks, so you can imagine my joy
• We have bought lime putty for the limewash part of the Great Homemade Paints Experiment
• We did a mammoth trip to Gillingham B&Q (apparently the second-largest in England, but my brain cannot compute how big a bigger B&Q could possibly be) and I think we’re now basically sorted for hardware supplies (apart from bathroom paint) until we move in – paint stripper, sugar soap, paint brushes, a paint mixer attachment for the electric drill, Polyfilla to fix the gouges out of the door and so on
• We have finalised the decision for the feature-wall tiles in the bathroom – green handmade Mexican terracotta tiles:

Up for reconsideration:

• Patrick Baty, a highly respected colour & paint expert and interesting Twitter personage, recommends against limewashing the floors. I’ve asked him for more detail as to why not. I do know that there could be problems – hence the plan to test it on some spare floorboards first and having a contingency plan to stain the boards instead with tea and steel wool in vinegar – but given that most books seem to just ignore the possibility of limewashing your floor, rather than say why they’re not talking about it, it’s hard to know what the problem is, especially given that the Georgian Group’s Book of the Georgian House cites an historical reference indicating that English floors were sometimes limewashed. Anyway, I plan to forge ahead with my test this week, but will definitely bear in mind Patrick’s anti-recommendation…