You may recall our Prime Minister made a statement on Sunday night affecting most of our plans for Christmas, so we were half expecting to hear there might be a problem with the carpet. Sadly on Monday morning, the supplier phoned to say she had two people off in the fitting team; one with Covid, and the other with a child with Covid. We are now scheduled to take delivery on 12th January, so I fear the cloister corridor will look like this over Christmas…

As we look at Pip’s Christmas tree, this year in the ‘turret’ window…

…it only remains to wish you all a very Happy Christmas (which will probably be very memorable through being rather different) and a better 2021 than 2020! Here’s hoping we are able to see some of you next year!

…just in time for the carpet, which should arrive early next week. One of our last challenges was finishing off the doorway below, which sits in an original window aperture which is much higher than the doorway. We have constructed a mini-ceiling…

…which, now it has been plastered, looks a bit more normal, and certainly reduces the drafts!

We have plastered the rest of the ceiling…

and then enjoyed a relatively restful weekend.

On Monday, Shaun joined us to put his professional gloss onto the decoration. He was a little surprised to see how disappointingly basic the graffiti was on the slate pillars (we provide an example below for your reference – perhaps a football supporter got distracted before he finished his work), but hopefully now this has all been removed.

We are grateful that with Shaun’s help, the corridor should be ready in time, noting that his finishing touches may need to follow a little later in the toilets as we are still finishing off the electrical and plumbing tasks.

Shaun is painting the slate wall magnolia now, so we can identify areas that need any remedial work, and because the corridor gets little natural light. We don’t have a carpet sample and my colour recall is not good enough to work out what colours would best complement it, so once the carpet is down we will look very critically at whether another colour would better suit the area.

Meanwhile, I have been relieved of building work for a day or so to write some essays, and Pips has been installing our Christmas tree, of which more next time…

…we can nearly taste it! We will struggle to be ready for the carpet, which arrives on 22nd December, but we will give it our best shot!

Speaking of which, Mike took the shot below last Friday of Moel Siabod wearing its first snowy coat since last winter.

This week we have made great progress. Mike has now plumbed in all five radiators, and completed installing the new electrical cables. I continued to clear the corridor by moving lots of our tools and consumables into a new area, and also cut lots of architrave and skirting board, ready to fix it in place when Mike can give me a hand.

Today, with the electrical cables in place, we were able to put insulation between the joists and then screw the remaining plasterboard in place.

At one end of the corridor, the roof space continues into part of the building which will be completed in the next phase. To prevent any drafts until that roof is updated, we have carefully insulated as far as we can and then used squirty foam to fill any gaps too small for insulation board.

.When that was finished, we screwed in the last of the ceiling plaster boards. Tomorrow, whilst I am on Zoom with my Welsh class, Mike will be plastering the ceiling. That should then be dry enough on Sunday to allow me to restart the painting, of which more in my next blog post.

And just in case anyone is worried it is all work here, here’s a picture of Boyd and Lola so that you can see they are finally beginning to enjoy each other’s company!