just passing through

After its brief adventure being bare plaster and less-than-a-day of pale blueness the wall is now a reasonably smoothish white along with a quarter of the ceiling and a couple of the nearby walls which looked dry enough to try and paint. I'm getting extremely annoyed with the roller-frame thing and might do something rash like splash out on a fancy expensive roller which holds more than the meagre square metre's worth of paint retained by the rubbish things I'm using at the moment. There might be a short break tomorrow when nothing much gets done but the entire room should hopefully be undercoated by the weekend so that we can experience a spring morning's breakfasting and paper-reading in an entirely white room during the few hours of the day when direct sunlight enters the premises. If I remember I'll try and take some pictures of a few things for eBaying whilst the lighting and backdrop are available before the walls become a mundane but easily-rented-out-and-touched-up magnoliaicish sort of colour and the radiators are restored to their brackets.

There wouldn't usually be any rush to get this finished (the walls have been in their bare-plaster state for a couple of years prior to last week's re-skimming) but for some reason Nicky feels that everything must be complete before my parents pop up to visit next week because a: they might feel they have to help paint as they did once before years ago back when everything was bright blue and b: it seems to be incredibly shaming to have parents visit a half-decorated flat even though they've visited several times when it's been in far worse states and are in any case staying in an hotel a mile away rather than on the sofa bed in the flat. I certainly would not feel embarrassed to have my parents visit a half-painted, radiator-depleted, crap-filled unhoovered flat but they evidently instil different standards in people raised in Ayr.

It's odd having a freshly-painted wall opposite the sofa instead of the interestingly-mottled bare old plaster of the past couple of years. I was thinking I might look through some pictures at some point and do some speculative printing to see what might look nice blown up a bit, framed and walled but was informed unexpectedly this evening that there were to be no pictures on the walls when they're finished. I'm not sure if this is because of the content of the pictures (previously including one of a spilled cup of coffee and that one of me walking down the stairs with hands instead of feet in 6"x4" frames hanging from panel pins) or (I hoped) due to it being not regarded as a good idea to have nails or fixtures driven into the walls just after they've been all niced-up. This effect was then spoilt by the follow-up information concerning the intention to display our three framed painting-print things. I'll just have to lean something on the top of the radiator instead.