Leafing it to the last minute

And so I finish the year, and this year's Daily dolls' house December challenge.

Alas I haven't finished yesterday's kit, but I've opened it up, read the instructions (twice) and sorted out the pieces. Then I started carefully prising the stacks of leaves apart, holding my breath, and being paranoid that I'd accidentally sneeze and blow all the little teeny tiny leaves all over the place, causing me to spend next year trying to hunt them down (the instructions say there are at least 250 of the blighters in there...)

Today, in the list of yearly tasks, I repotted my work pot plants (and one from my bathroom) ready for another year. They're like hermit crabs, all moving up a size pot each year, and (not like hermit crabs) gradually all ending up in self-watering pots. Alas, it looks like Robert (Palmer: geddit?) is now so big, I may need a hand truck to get him from the car to my desk this next year...

But that doesn't explain the state of my hands in the first picture. After exactly a year of many excuses ('Too hot!' 'Too cold!' 'Too worried I'll balls it up!' 'Too difficult to schedule three to four times, exactly twelve hours apart...') I finally realised this morning that if I scheduled staining at 7:30 am and pm over the next couple of days, when the weather was coolish enough to safely stain,  I could possibly get these armchairs' wooden bits stained wenge before I went back to work for the year, and thus assembled, out of the workshop and into my lounge.

(Here they are in my shopping trolley on this day a year ago, when I snapped them up from ALDI for $30 each, marked down from $100, thinking I could try turning them into the frugal version of the IKEA Ekenäset. Which I'd actually bought two of just after I bought the flat, in that 'limited edition might miss out' frenzy, but knowing full well I had three years to return them if I changed my mind. Which I did and I did: partly because spending $600 on armchairs seemed ridiculous, but mainly because I quickly realised that the teaky-coloured wood didn't fit in with the wenge colour I had elsewhere in my lounge.)

Anyway, that's a very long-winded way of saying that I finally plucked up the courage to not only deal with the scariest kit in the whole stash, but also two armchairs that have been sitting around in boxes in the workshop for a year.

So far the prognosis is not looking good, but I remind myself that first coats usually look like shit and to withhold judgement until the third (or fourth) coat is on. And if it's all a disaster, it was a cheap-enough one...

And on that note, I wish you a happy new year: may the best of this year be the worst of next, and may all your pleasures be tiny ones!