You've Come a Long Way Baby - One Month of FTC

Try not to get emotional, but Keith and I are about to hit the end of our first month in FTC together. So, in honour of this momentous occasion, here is a quick update on how the place looks.

In no particular order we have the first bedroom, where the stack of boxes has been reduced to a dull roar, we now have curtains, wardrobes and, yes, even a picture on the wall. The bed is still a bit of an obstacle course due to the box of ali car panels but all in all, a very nice place to lay your head at the end of a hard day.

Next we have the second bedroom, once purple hell the carpet is long gone, the walls are painted and the ethnic dust collectors are now on the walls. The fish seem very happy with their new home and Keith's TV fits snuggly in the corner of the room so any guests wanting to visit are now well catered for.

For those of you wondering whether my contribution to the house has been 'managerial' I give you evidence of my hard work, such as it was. I managed to roller a wall and cut in half the room before I got fed up and moved on to something else.

There is sadly no evidence of my other DIY efforts including the notable high of me conquering my fear of household electrics and wiring in no less than 3 light switches (what can I say, the lure of the bakelite was too great) and glossing the wardrobes, one of them in the few hours after I got home from work one night.

I like to think of my contribution as more of a support role, cooking food for the troops, providing motivation and spending all the live long day trawling t'internet for the perfect purchases.

Hmmm, moving swiftly on ...

The office, now somewhere for Keith to move Kabie Consulting to new and dizzy heights. The laminate is gone and the walls are now ready for photos, the first of which has gone up - the race car towed by Mooch my old econoline, visions of matt black perfection both, with the Santa Pod finish gantry in the background.

The office is also home to Neo, Keith's gecko, who seems very nonchalant about his new surroundings. This may of course be bacuse he is strawberry short of a fruit salad and has yet to realise he has moved house, the jury is still out on that one. Since the move he has been introduced to food he can actually catch too - they have no legs - and watching the little fella pounce on them is almost worthy of a Benny Hill sound track.

Now we move downstairs, or under them to be more accurate. Keith and I both had large wardrobes at our old places and FTC didn't have the space to recreate that so we needed to come up with a good solution for storing coats and bike gear.

What you see here is stage 1 of the solution: The coat rail. We will store Imelda Marcos' shoe collection under it and there will be a shelf going in over the top of the rail to house the hat and lid collection.

The lounge is pretty much there now, though we are having slight issues finding frames for the pictures we have bought. We've gone for retro car posters and there seems to be a conspiracy between poster printers and frame makers so that the sizes of each are wildly different so you have to either hack up the poster you have just spend hours finding and good money paying for or get a frame with an acre of white border at a vastly more expensive price. Bare faced cheek if you ask me!!

So there you go, the more observant of you will realise that I haven't said anything about the barn or garden in my update but as with the kitchen, those little cookies deserve a section to themselves which will be coming as soon as I manage to get Keith over his stage fright ... And that's got 'can open, worms everywhere' written all over it!!