Ch-ch-changes

This break has been characterised by a couple of fairly major changes of heart.

Firstly, we changed our minds about going away. Originally, we had planned on going on a city break for three days at the end of this week. We wanted to go to Rome or Vienna but when we went into the travel agents in town at the beginning of last week the trips they had were just too expensive for us. We may have been able to get a cheaper deal online but I didn't really have the time to look. So, we changed our minds and decided to go away up to Edinburgh, instead. Then we talked about it a little more and came to the realisation that neither of us was really all that bothered about it so we changed our minds again and no we're not going away at all. Instead we decided to go into London for a couple of days out now that the trains are running again.

By a cunning piece of planning, we said we'd go to Kew Gardens yesterday and so it was we found ourselves, on the hottest day of the year so far, wandering amongst the trees in the sun rather than boiling ourselves by trying to work through the heat. We had a lovely day, despite trouble on the trains on the way in, and both thoroughly enjoyed it. So much so, in fact, that we carried it on when we got back and went out for dinner in a little Italian Trattoria in Hemel. I wasn't expecting too much from it (it's only a small restaurant in the town centre, after all) but the food was fabulous and the service excellent so we'll definitely be going back there again.

This morning, I got up and put some primer on the new plaster that the electrician had done last week and then made preparations to start painting the room. Before we started that we wanted to check one last time that the wardrobes we bought were going to fit. One of them is obviously no problem at all but the other was meant to fit in the gap between the chimney and the outside wall. We'd measured it before and knew there was only going to be a couple of inches spare but what we hadn't recknoed on was the window being off-centre in the room and how that would affect it. The front of the wardrobe was going to be flush with the edge of the window and it was going to prove rather difficult to fix the curtain track up so that it would run down beside the wardrobe. It would have involved ripping out a bit of skirting board to give us another half-inch of room and then bodging the tracking so that it ran pretty close to the wall.

In short, the likelihood was that, even if it all worked, it would look awful and that's not what we want in this room. Therefore, our second major change of plan was to only have the one wardrobe in the main bedroom and put the other in the spare room. In doing that we not only save ourselves a lot of bother but we also gain space in the room and it won't feel anywhere near as crowded as it was going to.

Having finally made that decision, we opened the first tin of paint and got to work. Two of the walls now have a first coat of 'Soft Linen' (a very calm, soft cream colour) on them and will be finished off tomorrow. The same colour will be going on the third wall, once we've taken the radiator off, but the fourth wall is going to be different. Very different. We wanted to make a feature out of the colour of the wall opposite the window so we are going to paint it a very deep purple colour (called 'Damson Dream 1'). It's almost aubergine in shade and, with the bed against it, is going to look fabulous.

We hope.

The first coat of that will go on tomorrow, too, so we'll soon know if it's going to work.