Renovation Project - Decorating and varnishing old floors in France

Renovation Project - Decorating and varnishing old floors in France

The plaster in the front bedroom has dried and it’s time to decorate and finish the floors.

But first John has to make some internal window sills, these are made with a solid piece of wood, but do not look very solid, this is remedied easily by adding a wooden baton and hiding the join, this makes the sills look much thicker, it will also stop the wood from bowing.

We remove the bed completely from the room, if you can empty a room completely the decorating is so much easier and quicker.

We have decided not to stain these floors as they are the original floorboards, John is still iffing and arring about whether we need to replace the floor boards and we have our regular discussion about the fact that the house is old and old floors look better.

The floor takes 2 coats of varnish and I love it when it’s finished, this is now my favourite floor in the house, I much prefer the older wood with the wood worm tracks, I think it gives so much more character to the house (well now that the woodworm have well and truly gone, I don’t think I’d be too happy if there was still any trace of live woodworm!!)

Once the floor is finished and dried (this is almost like Blue Peter, take a bit away and here’s one I made earlier!) it’s time to start on the decorating, I can’t believe the 2^nd bedroom is almost ready!

I set too with the knocking in, we are painting everything white so there is no fiddly cutting in, and John starts with the roller. I hear a shout and John asks what the....... (Insert your own swear words here) am I doing, apparently the skirting boards are staying brown (one patch now has a lot of white on it).

This is something we had discussed and I had somehow forgotten, oops! So there is lots of fiddly cutting in to do. We follow each other around the room until the first coat is completed. Then it’s time for a break.

We start on the second coat and I stop part way to go and make dinner. Its well into the evening as the painting is finished and we are both knackered, we both seem to be working later and later at the moment, but we do have that time limit looming!