It's curtains to undressed windows

Well actually that awful pun is a bit premature. I have started our bedroom curtains but I'm not finished yet. And my spool just ran out half way along a seam and I didn't notice until the end. So I'm in a bad mood with my curtains. I'm going to try and cheer myself up by showing you my work in progress. This is the first time I've made lined curtains so it's a new experience for me. I'm more used to making dresses out of curtains rather than actually using them to make curtains.

You can see that one thing hampering my curtain making is the fact that my sewing room has become a bit of a box repository in our enthusiasm for clearing the sitting room. Look how tidy it used to be!

I've never sewn anything with this much fabric before. I wish I had more space!

I will keep you updates on my curtain progress but I have a busy week ahead of me so don't hold your breath!

New furniture and child labour

So Super Stephen is back doing more painting for us. I like having a retired father-in-law. Here he is polly-filla-ing the hole where a wall light used to be. We finally got round to calling out the electricians  so we've taken out 2 wall lights and reinstated a pendant light in the hall. And finally both our upstairs and downstairs lights can turn the stairs lights on, yippee, no more falling down stairs in the dark.

Stephen also brought down the most amazing piece of furniture in the world, an old dental cabinet.  Look isn't it wicked! We're going to use it as a drinks cabinet I think.

Meanwhile Laura brought us round some extra labour

Yes, James is up the ladder ready for painting. We'd better arrange to get our chimney unblocked before he grows much bigger.

oh yeah, Jon did some painting too

New lights! Thank you to my ex-colleagues at The Cuming Museum for our John Lewis vouchers. Now we just need to redo our 'decs' as the electrician said

white hall!

Stephen also brought us some nice stained glass bits. Not sure where they will go eventually but here they are looking pretty in the living room window

Door knob

what more can I say? Jon's put a new door knob on the bathroom

The sitting room gets sat in

Just to prove that we don't spend all our time faffing in our house with diy. Sometimes we invite people round to congratulate us on all our hard work too.

James Francis shows he's a mean organ player

and face eater. He actually drew blood!

The only person sitting in this photo isn't even using a chair! Maybe it is a standing room instead. P.S. do you like my temporary makeshift curtains? 

Somewhere to sit and super 8 cinema

Finally after weeks of not doing anything really big we now have the start of a sitting room. Stephen came down and did most of the painting with Jon on Friday and we polished it off on Sunday morning. The wood still needs doing but that's a perfect mid-week job for Jon.

Can you spot Stephen?

STOP........Hannah-time, back in the painting game

somehow I just kept getting paint in my mouth

look at us, now we're a two-step-ladder-family

Oh no! another mysterious spot, a-la The Green Dot

Doesn't our sitting room look lovely! Jon's settling in with some haunting organ melodies

Dad brought us a new chair (the one in the foreground). It was my great-grandmothers and used to live in a farm house in Wales, brilliant! I also recognise the covering material and think my Mum may have covered it many moons ago...

Seriously, our Hammond Organ is a fab piece of furniture in our sitting room. And it will be very useful when we run our living-room super 8 cinema (possibly with live score, Jon?). We watched a, very much abridged, version of Battlestar Galactica on super 8 the other night. It was so cool, sitting in our new living room watching proper film on our lovely blank wall. We're going to keep a wall blank solely for this purpose. Maybe we'll run a peek-a-boo-through-the-window cinema for the E17 art trail next year.