o Natal está chegando !
With the year 2020 entering it's last month and the festive season looming on the horizon we [Janet] decided that we should prepare for Christmas and begin decorating the house.
It will be very, very different this year.
The old part of our house is still resembling a deconstruction site but we need the space to for the dining table. As attractive as it may be, Christmas dinner on the settee in front of the telly is not really what we want. So a large chunk of the upstairs room has been cleared to use as a makeshift dining room.
We have no heating up there, one of the windows has a broken pane, we have two large heaps of rubble, a stack of firewood and no covering on the very uneven floorboards, but at least we have a new roof.
Challenge one: levelling the table.
Our dining table is chunky and quite heavy, the floor resembles the rolling hills of Portugal. Luckily I have a pile of scrap wood for propping up the table legs. Three of the four legs needed packing, 35mm under on leg !! The table top is now perfectly level so the food will not slide off.
Challenge two: keeping the dust down.
Plastic sheets over the rubble piles should help. Not very pretty but functional.
Challenge three: lighting the tree.
I previously disconnected all of the electric to this part of the house. The UPS power for the computer and WiFi is in the cavity next to the room so I used yet another extension cable to bring electricity into the room. All the decorations are low power LED units easily accommodated by the UPS so we get the bonus of having mood lighting if the electricity supply fails - as it inevitably will.
Then onwards and outwards, some lighting for the exterior.
