The Reno: Week 2

This week we cracked on with filling the holes in the wall and sanding them back, sanding down the rusty metal bars and painting the library; white and blue walls inside, white outside with blue border. We also had the carpentry fundi's working in the library making the shelves for us, which was exciting to watch. It was slightly frustrating having to work around them, trying to paint walls while they sawed wood, but we didn't have a choice and made it work. First problem arose when the ‘sky blue’ paint we had bought turned out to be rather greyer and more expired than we had hoped, but eventually got a nice blue that we mixed with some white paint. The rollers had to have branches attached to them to reach the top bits, and Steff stood on tables to reach the edges! Nice and safe.

By Friday all of the second coat of blue and the third and final coats of white had been completed and we made a start on painting the metal bars blue, which we had already painted with an anti-rust paint. As the fundis refused to take the outside metal grid off, we painted through it carefully with a toothbrush dipped in the oil paint. That was very fiddly work. Finally we painted around the frames with thick white to cover any blue drips. We left at 6.10pm as the sun was setting and were very, very tired!