Rubbing me up the wrong way!

Now that the walls and ceiling are (mostly) finished, it's time to tackle the floor. We're lucky to have the original parquet hidden under layers of grub, so my next job is to bring it, gloriously, to the surface. After a general sweep up, I set about running an electric sander over every inch. It's surprisingly strenuous work, as the sander tries very hard to escape, and it produces a lot of smelly dust. This has meant wearing a face mask and goggles. This never makes me happy, as the goggles keep steaming up, and I don't like having to breathe in spent breath. There's a little 'hoover bag' attached, but it is fastened with a zip, and zips leak. Hot smelly dust is blasted out at me as I waddle and slide around, painfully, on my knees.

Accidents have been kept to a minimum. The sandpaper belts have snapped twice, leading to me ploughing the sander into the floor, and, once, I sucked up the lead into the bowels of the sander, creating black smoke and worrying noises. Kevin had to cut the lead and rejoin it using a little bit of see-through Lego.

I haven't done a good job. The wood is pock-marked, gouged and still riddled with plastery patches. I'm going to have to go over the whole lot again, but I'm loathe to do it too much, as the vibration is making my fingers and hands go numb at night.

I'm also continuing to strip paint from the old windows, inside and out. The blue is stubborn! But I'll get the better of it. I've bought some dove grey paint. Those metal shutters are extremely complicated to remove entirely, so I'll probably just give them a very quick rub-down and then paint them. Maybe with spray paint for metal. There is still some debate about the colour. The debate is taking place inside my head; at the moment I can't decide between dove grey, cornflower blue, or pale sage green. I'm slowly going off the cornflower blue idea as a result of the stubborn stuff. I probably won't have much choice when I finally go to look at the colour range of paints for metal. I'll probably have to select from black, scarlet or racing green.