The decorator is starting next week. We weren’t expecting him until then so no real surprise. He had said the first week in April so we assumed the first full week. This will make such a huge difference as it is the last big thing that needs doing. It will mean that we can start to get straight again and dig things out from under mountains of boxes. And start using more than one very small room to live in again! It looks like the decorator is going to beat the carpenter, so the internal doors will arrive afterwards.
We’ve been talking about electricity and what we want to do about wiring. We had the local electrician come in to do some odds and ends. I have never seen anything quite so ugly. Not the electrician – the wiring. It didn’t help that he used our old yukky plugs. The work that he did in the kitchen and bathrooms was fine – it was just the cables that he ran over the wall that were horrible. Where we had a double plug, he’d fitted it so it was vertical. Surprisingly, this worried me much more than it did Ian. It is normally the other way around. Ian pointed out that with surface mounted wires, double sockets etc are always vertical when they come down the wall. Which I grudgingly understand.
The wiring is only temporary as we need to decide what we are going to ultimately do. We need to undo all the wires on the wall so the decorator can paint underneath. We’ll then either replace the existing wires with twisty wires which works out about 6 euro a meter, or we might look at running it through surface mounted tubing, which is very expensive – however Ian has had an idea about using plastic tubing and painting it with a metal-look paint.
See pics below for an idea of what our options are. The first one has twisty wires, the other two are wires through surface mounted tubes:
