4 days to go

We have painted everything that moves, and stands still, the whole shop was bright white until today. When we left last night there were bare floorboards, this morning it has been transformed by carpet and we can walk around without shoes on. What we didn't realise is that the furniture would still be slightly wet so the poor carpet fitters were covered in paint, we thought everything was a bit tacky and as long as they didn't touch anything too roughly they would be okay but Martin discovered the wet bits underneath the units. Oops! 

 There is one part of the shop we are not too happy with and thats the piece of wall that covers some pipes which we have christenend the scabby post - the paint keeps flaking and we are so fed up of painting that we are going to make a feature of it (or cover it with something). 

We are really pleased with ourselves, we have done the large majority of the work on our own.  I have an impressive pair of biceps and Joan is covered in blisters but she is now thinking she might help with the decorating at home which her husband will be delighted to hear.

The final stage is the sign writing, which should be done this weekend, and taking delivery of more stock and putting it on the shelves.  All we have to panic about now is if we have any customers!!!

Exhausted

We are both exhausted - went in on Saturday to finish off all the painting but by lunchtime we realised that this wasn't likely to happen as we had only just finished taping all the plaster board joints.  Luckily Joan's sister and dad turned up, in their painting gear, to help. With their help all the walls and ceiling were given a coat of paint - it now looks gorgeous but there is still loads to do.    I am sure all the passers by found it hilarious to see this grown up woman (me) struggling to get up and down a ladder and holding on for dear life at the dizzy height of 4 steps.  Joan and her dad had matching hats on, she calls it her cricket hat which I did take photos of but my computer won't read the card from my camera.  We finally left about 4 in the afternoon and my legs were just about giving up as we walked to the car.

You can now see a picture of the new shop front which I have taken with another camera

Still decorating

Today we are painting the walls and ceiling - its taken four days of preparation and as long as we don't find lumps of filler on the floor (from holes in the ceiling that we filled on Thursday) we should be able to cover it all in white paint and it will look gorgeous!

If you are walking past today and see two exhausted, old  (not too old) women lying on the floor in the shop please bring coffee (tea for Joan)

Will take a picture of the shop today before I get covered in paint and when there are no vans parked outside

Replacement of shop front

As you can see from the picture the shop front was not particularly attractive, thankfully it has been replaced as the building is listed and aluminium frames did not comply. We now have a lovely wooden front which I will photograph tomorrow so that you can see the difference.



Our job now is to match the inside to the outside which sounds so easy!!! We have had plenty of advice on what to do, and how to do it, from husbands and builders. It didn't seem like it would be too difficult and we definitely don't want to spend our stock money on painters & decorators so have decided to do the work ourselves (something we are already beginning to regret). Our first task was to prepare the plasterboard which (we were advised) meant watering down emulsion so the board could absorb the moisture - no idea why. Within two minutes we were both covered in paint as the rollers just sprayed the emulsion everywhere, over us, the floor but just dripped down the walls.



I thought we would have the whole shop painted in two days but at the end of the second day we still have not filled in all the screw holes in the plasterboard or covered it all with the first coat of paint. Joan has spent most of today trying to pull off carpet which appears to be superglued onto board, her hands were covered in plasters by lunchtime. We then had a visit from the lovely Martin (Chilcott Carpets) who advised us to take up the board as well so all Joan's effort was wasted, but it was good exercise.



After all the work we put in yesterday one of the builders who is making a shop counter for us said to Joan that he hoped we were going to go over all the joins with filler (which I would like to say that I had done but obviously not to a professionals standard)so tomorrow we will be back re-filling and spraying paint everywhere.