Wohoo, May Bank Holiday Weekend!

Mmmmmmmm, Bank Holiday weeekennnnd.

It sort of crept up on me unawares, to be honest, but that's probably a good thing - like the way the best nights out are usually the ones that have the least planning and preparation behind them.

Anyways, this long weekend, I will be mostly:

- trying to finish painting the stairs. It's been undercoated and I have the non-drip gloss ready to go, so fingers crossed that the steps and spindles will at least be sorted come Monday night. Haven't decided exactly what to do with the banister (banister? Balastraude? Whatever) but think I will try and coax it towards a dark, almost ebonized (spelt the American way this time because it seems to be mostly popular with American woodworker/wood enthusiast types) finish for the time being. Will probably stain it with a dark Jacobean oak wood dye to take down the nasty orangey pine of bog standard "new house stairs", then try ebonizing and varnishing it.

As Zee sagely pointed out, I can always paint over it if the dark wood look goes horribly wrong.

- getting some class of mesh-y yoke to go on the shelves in the hotpress. At the minute, you could lose entire herds of elephants between the slats of the shelves.

No, it's not a particularly exciting thing to be planning to do for a BH weekend, but to be frank (Hello there, I'm Frank) I'm more than a little fed up of my knickers (and not just the little ones - even my Spanx, like) winding up down the back of the tank.

Hopefully, having a properly useable hot press will have a knock-on effect and will lessen the amount of time that the lovely dining room table spends masquerading as a clothes bin in a Chinese laundry, thereby reducing how often I stress myself out about "the state!" of the house. I find it very difficult to relax if the place is like a tip. So you can see why the mesh-y yoke is a priority item.

- buying some greenery for the back garden; mostly ornamental grasses and sculptural-looking plants like Allium or Eryngium. I really want to get decorative gravel down around the border of the grass, but there's not much point doing that before the gravel is down. Oh, and I have to come up with an attractive way to segregate the two so that the lawnmower doesn't start chewing the gravel. Hmmm.

- pretending that I might get the kitchen presses (finally!) finished. I don't know why, I mean I'm fooling no one. (Nope, not even myself.)

- rooting out tester pots of a myriad of whites that I used when we were picking paint for our bedroom (ultimately went with B&Q's Antique White, incase you were wondering) to slap up in the hall and landing. I'd like the hall to be cream (it's currently white which I think looks overly stark), but as there's no window in the hall or on the landing it's as dark as the back arse of a coal pit which means that things like Farrow & Ball's Pointing or Tallow or Dulux's Summer Solstice or Crown's Monaco Light that are nearly luminescent in a normal room look a dirty yella in our hall. So maybe an off-white will look more cream than these creams themselves, if you get me.

- getting a bit depressed that my plans for a three-day weekend don't extend beyond doing house-y things. Oh sure, maybe one of the evenings we'll go see Iron Man or crack open a bottle of red with our Indian and watch a DVD and have some Pringles, but time was when a Bank Holiday meant back-to-back sessions that started on Thursday night and ran right through to Monday, punctuated only by the obligatory costume change between outings and a few minutes kip.

Jesus. Now I feel old.