The day started disappointingly for the pups today. After their success yesterday in locking Kate in the stable, they were keen to advance their skills and learn how to close the bolts on the stable doors, having developed quite supreme skills in operating the foot latches. However, I had to press on with getting the dining room ready for decorating, so the puppies had to involve themselves in their own training (early afternoon the ice cream van exploded in the village and I noticed Basil burying a sturdy metal pipe that looked suspisciously like a cannon – I’m not happy).
Anyway the dining room is what matters and I’m sure we can last one Sunday without ice cream. So it was that at 7.15 I got up and started to attack the last few small pieces of wallpaper that remained on the walls of the dining room. Kate’s parents had stripped almost all the paper off the walls some time ago on one of their visits, and as I looked at the walls this morning I thought they could have done slightly better and finished the job completely as almost 2% of the walls still had paper on.
By 5pm today I started to appreciate I was very lucky that Janet and John had done the hard work. Wallpaper is evil. Together we’ll crack it.
We’ve now applied a coat of white paint to the dining room and we’re looking forward to seeing the room properly painted, with furniture in place and paintings hanging on walls.
I had to interrupt decorating this evening as the chicken shed door had slammed shut and the young chicks and one light sussex had decided to pass out under the shed. A couple of weeks ago it wouldn’t have been an issue but at present we’d prefer not to take the chance, so we both had to scramble around in the mud in the rain and poke them with the handle of a rake until we’d forced them out into the open, from whence we could throw them into the shed.
One of these little chicks was little TanTan, a semi-tame little chick who has become a bit of a favourite. I’d rather hoped Tan Tan would grow into a bantam hen, but is currently starting to show worrying signs of being a cock.
It won’t be quite a cute anymore.