Varnishing to last...

Happy Sunday to you! 

From having and extremely busy April on this blog, I went on to have a very non-blogging month of May. I was busy but not with blogging, and not with new writing either.

May was dedicated to catching up with gardening and household maintenance, the upgrade jobs that are needed every few years and which I've tended to do myself since I moved to this property some 31 years ago.

I'm hoping for a beautiful summer bedding display from all of the plants I've now got into my hanging baskets and display pots that are dotted around. I admit to being slower to complete the garden jobs (Could it be an age thing? Absolutely never!) since I've still to transplant my tomatoes, into medium sized pots, those reared from seed! 

May has been a long slog of varnishing and painting. Around 25 years ago, when we installed new double-glazing the so called 'dark oak' UPVC options, in our opinion, looked tatty and didn't match the age of the property which is almost 200 years old. The hardwood/timber framed double glazed areas we installed back then still look very smart - but only when I regularly do the hard graft of applying three coats of varnish (3 applications are supposed to last for 5 years but don't in our Aberdeenshire weather). 

I love it when all of my doors and windows are sparklingly newly-varnished, but it takes huge amounts of my time and some considerable effort climbing up and down a ladder (probably barely complying with health and safety these days). The heady sense of achievement, when the first coat on the ten areas around the house is done, becomes a tedious dogged determination to keep going by the end of coat number three. 

The last lick of varnish seems like it was done only 3 years ago but from the state of the deterioration in the first image above, I'm guessing I cheated and only gave it one, or at best two coats, last time. 

Were I earning pots of money from sales of my novels (and if they weren't being pirated so often thus me earning zero from them), I might have paid a painter and decorator to do it. Maybe next time around? Who knows. 

I've still got lots of reviews for books I've read in May to catch up with but the big news is that from the 5th of June I'm involved in a very special Historical Fiction Blog Hop. 

There's a post about this coming very soon...

Slainthe!