Fay Downing

This week we were back to the Mencap centre, helping with their renovations. Following on from the great start me and Joel made a couple of weeks ago painting the feature wall in the main hall, we were tasked with doing some more painting.

Me, Joel and Fay applied a second coat of the beautiful Mencap Mauve to the feature wall and Andy and Rachel made a start on another key wall in a Gorgeous Green. We were also meant to make a start in the office but with only one step ladder to reach the higher areas we were a bit pressed for time so this will have to wait for another week.

First Andy and Joel moved the large cabinets out of the way of the walls we were painting. Me and Fay then began cutting in whilst Joel rolled out the middle areas of the feature wall. I’ve no idea how Andy and Rachel split their work up as I was concentrating on not falling off of the ladder but they did a fantastic job either way. As they finished their wall first they made a start with the washing up before they were joined by the rest of us. We even moved a couple of tables around as well and with the cabinets moved back we admired our handy work before setting off home for a well-earned dinner.

Thanks for all your help everyone, hopefully see you all again at another task shortly.

Next week we are back at the Great Baddow Community Allotment to turn over another area and make it ready for planting which you can sign up to here.

The easing of the lockdown restrictions meant the arrival of our first mid-week task of the year!! Whooo hooo!!!!

7 GoodGym runners split into two teams to help the City of Chelmsford Mencap prepare for their renovations before their grand reopening at the end of April. They had a lot of big heavy furniture that needed to be put into storage so they didn’t get in the way of the new flooring being installed. Myself, Catherine, Russell D and Fay met up at the Mencap centre on Mildmay Road where we met Karen to load the items onto the removal van. Rich, Jenny and James met up at the Big Yellow Storage to unload the van and put the items safely into their new home for the next few weeks. For the ‘Mencap’ group this meant being mainly indoors. Unfortunately for the ‘Big Yellow’ group, it meant they were waiting outside on a sunny and beautiful but rather chilly April evening. Luckily James and Rich bought their winter coats!

The task didn’t take quite as long as had been potentially anticipated though and within 30 minutes we had loaded up the tables and storage units on to the van and just had a few other things to move around such as the piano that had a mind of it's own into the lobby and a few smaller tables out of the way. Unless I hear otherwise I can only assume everything went swimmingly at the Big Yellow end.

It was great to be back at the Mencap centre after such a long hiatus. Hopefully we will be back again shortly after the renovations are completed to move things back from the Big Yellow Storage and maybe to even to do some painting, which we were originally meant to have done in November but that second lockdown thingy got in the way a bit.

Well done everyone, see you all again soon!!

A zoom session full of fun.

The link will be emailed out about half an hour before the session. Hope to see many of you there.

This week’s lockdown challenge was to make the most of the snow that had fallen in Essex and find any snow sculptures people had built whilst trying to not slip over on the ice rinks our local parks had become.

Fay, Rich, Laurie and myself found some of the rather sparse snowmen dotted around and Rich also managed to get a picture of a Robin. But the best find has to go to Fay who found a rather large Igloo on her dog walk that clearly took a lot of time and dedication to build. Well done Fay!!

A zoom session full of fun, you will need a camera phone and to be on our Whatsapp group to take part in the game and afterwards we can have a long overdue catch up.

The zoom link will be emailed out about half an hour before the session. Hope to see many of you there.