The days  of exchanging my labour sanding and varnishing on boats for a roof over my head and food in my stomach are, thankfully, many, many years behind me.  They were the legacy of being a blindingly optimistic just 20-something buying a one-way ticket for a Caribbean adventure.  But that’s a story for another day, perhaps.  Anyhow, I have spent many hours varnishing.  Sufficient, one might have thought, to remember that you can’t clean  varnish with white spirits.  Clearly zee leetle grey cells are deteriorating (or perhaps dead).

This week Graham decided that the steps going up to the new master bathroom at Les Terraces were looking rather the worse for wear.  To be honest they didn’t look any different than before the remodelling of the studio, it’s just that the glistening new bathroom rather highlights their previous state of “interestingly worn” and makes them look, well, knackered.  So I gamely took the orbital sander to give them all a light sanding down, only to discover that earlier “artisans” had actually varnished over drops and splodges of paint and glue.  This meant that several areas had to be taken back to bare wood.  And then they had to be stained in an endeavour to match the rest of the wood …. and so on.  I shan’t bore you with any further details, save for the small one of deciding that while I was going to have a pot of varnish out I thought that I ought to try and make good on some scuffs and scratches that appeared on the top of the old dining table that we inherited with the house and decided to use as a base for the new bathroom sink (of which I think I wrote last year).   So I wiped it down with some white spirit (Vince, I can hear you going “Nooooo, not that.  Please don’t do that”).  Bad move.  Very bad move.  Very, very blonde.  Why?  Well, the old (new last autumn) varnish started to dissolve.  Hmm….. what to do?  I know! Leave it to dry, and then give it a quick sand.  Right?  Wrong.  It lifted in long ribbons and clogged the sandpaper. The best fix turned out to be sanding it all the way back down to bare wood and starting all over again.  You are at liberty to imagine the little cloud of *@!!*-infused blue air that filled the dressing room along with all of the dust.

Anyhow, 2 days later and it must be admitted that it turned out to be a job well done.  No, I don’t think that I mean that.  What I actually mean is that it looks much better than it did before and we’d been quite chuffed with how good it looked in September.  So, there we go.  The steps look better too (Graham’s never wrong on these matters, I’m just lazy), and so does the dressing table and, while I was at it I varnished the sills on the half walls that divide the bedroom from both bath- and dressing-rooms.  Be warned – don’t stand still for too long else you may find yourself being spruced up with a quick coat of polyurethane or two too!