I last left you with a chaotic tableaux of generations of paint melded with half-removed wallpaper. It gets better.

Feeling Blue

Combining climbing with wallpaper removal and wall preparation is not ideal, particularly when you’re generally unaccustomed to using those muscle groups. It’s not impossible, but it does make for an additional challenge level. Eventually I landed on the combination of scraping violently and peeling to remove the top layer, then steaming the under layer. Compared to painting, the preparation was incredibly time consuming. I swear it gets better.

After washing the wall, I had to remove wall plugs, fill holes with Polyfilla, masking tape, and finally give the whole thing a light sand. I started trying to pull the plugs out with pliers, then leaving the screw in a little and pulling, but the fastest (and cleanest method) was drilling them out. It takes a few seconds and the waste is easily brushed out.

The colour choice was influenced by the blue elsewhere in the kitchen, which was “Fréjus” from B&Q’s range of coloured emulsion paints. I’m done with grey – there’s little enough light in this kitchen without making the place even more dull and uninspired.

I love the uplifting and bright feeling with a light blue, particularly coming into the lighter evenings. It pain(t)s me a little that someone is going to drill into the wall and destroy it locally to fit radiator, but I’m glad that I’ve managed to get this done before the new plumbing as peeling off wallpaper around obstructions is a massive pain in the ass. I’ve done enough of it for one lifetime, and I never intend to use wallpaper partly for that reason. I also grew up with paint walls, and wallpaper never particularly appealed to me. I’d be much more impressed by a stencilled paint pattern than a patterned wallpaper. Perhaps it’s also the impermanence of wallpaper that I also dislike.

The Grand Clear Out

Getting the house ready for the heat pump has been challenging, partly because we keep acquiring things at a higher rate than we get rid of them. Having said that, I have started to embrace getting rid-of-ness. All of the bits and pieces cluttering up our house are fair game for the eBay, classifieds, and the charity shop. Having sold the dresser with the wine rack, we’re at an awkward stage of not having enough storage but that will hopefully be remedied by some shelves above the new radiator, and some more alcove shelving below the wine glass rack.

Deadly Diving

Now that I’m exam free, what better way to spend my free time than…with an online course? I’m spending some of my evenings studying a diving medicine course to gain a better understanding of the world of diving. It covers a lot of ground, from the physics of gases and diving physiology, to equipment and dealing with diving emergencies. Getting back into gas equations has been far from easy, but it has helped reinforce some of the key principles, and I’m hoping some of the information will stick with me when I start doing post mortems for recreational diving deaths. I should probably be spending less time studying diving and more playing Subnautica instead.

Time to get ready for the chaos that the heat pump installation will bring. Wish me luck!