Another week, another night of chipping away at this monster of a mission!

This time, Nigel and ~Nat~ turned up early to get a head start with the scrapers, our new favourite tool as recommended by Joel last week.

Doing it this way really does seem to help speed up the painting process and I'm sure we got through more of the railings last night than we have done on any of the nights before. Although some of that might be due to painting in almost sub-zero temperatures earlier in the year… Team Scrape have prepped a good chunk ready for us to get cracking with when we come back in a couple of weeks.

Welcome to Chloe who joined us for her first task! Hopefully see you again sometime soon!

Dayna, Florence and Nigel were joined by new comers Saul and Joel for the latest session of painting the railings at the ICCA Centre. Saul shared his memories of the building from the days it was owned by Sunblest and the resulting daily aroma of freshly baked bread. He also produced a steel brush and paint scraper that improved the preparation process significantly. Definitely good learning for our future sessions at this task as we work patiently towards its conclusion.

Wooooah, we're (roughly) halfway there! Woooooooooooooah! And paint is in our haaaair!

This week we were tackling the most intricate part of the ICCA's railings so far – the double gate!

We were wondering what the letters in the middle of each gate were and I'm pleased to tell you that I found out. The building was originally a factory for Thomas Forman and Sons – apparently inspired in design by Buckingham Palace. Every day's a school day.

I'm not sure if it was the heat making it super gloopy or what, but the paint was still as unwieldy as it was back in the dark and windy nights we were here in the winter and spring, so we all came home sporting various levels of paint coverage ourselves. Rachel had to bathe her legs in white spirit to get hers off!

We also welcomed back Florence and Elspeth after some time away. Hopefully see you all again soon!

This week saw us return to the Meadows Food Bank. Did you know it was the venue for GoodGym Nottingham's first "proper" task nearly three years ago? Leah, Peter and Rachel were all there for it, and by the way the tasks fell, it turned out to be the venue for Leah's 100th this week. Most serendipitous!

We met up with Mark as usual on arrival who had plenty for us to get stuck into.

Leah and Peter summoned up their inner Dale Wintons for a round of Supermarket Sweep, boxing up two-person packages ready to be bagged and sent home with service users in the coming days. Meanwhile, Khiltee, Nigel and Florence were on clothes duty, hanging things up on rails and making it look a lot nicer. Matt, Sarah and Charlie were bagging up toiletry packs (somehow that stock of mini soaps is still going).

Finally, it was all hands on deck sorting out the dried pasta stocks, making sure everything went in the right date order so the older stuff gets distributed first.

We just had time to gobble a few celebratory muffins and flapjacks before heading our separate ways.

No task next week, but we're back at Sherwood Community Centre on 3 June!