Christmas is coming early

I have had butterflies of excitement in anticipation of finishing the house and moving in. HUGE milestone reached this week: the last spot of mud was covered in lime plaster and the finishing touches (blending seams of plasters and touching up small spots along trim work etc.) have been mostly completed. Thanks to Charles and Phil for sticking it out with us and doing some gorgeous finish work. My trowelling and surfacing abilities are much inferior to theirs!

Charles has also been assisting us by sanding and oiling the loft floor and stairs. We are using tung oil on the floors as opposed to a varnish. It seems healthier and easy to maintain.

I had hoped we would be ready to acid stain the floors tomorrow, but there is *so* much clean up work to do! Plastering is indeed dirty work, and a year of mud and lime dirt requires a lot of vacuuming, sanding, scrubbing, sweeping....scraping....scrubbing..you get the picture.

We will likely move in with a bit of finish work left to do like filling nail holes, varnishing trims etc., but I can do a lot of that over the Christmas holidays. How different life will be not living in a construction zone....

Visions of a clean, settled home are dancing in my head...

(photos to come soon).