At the start of the planning for the Open Day, it was decided to use the corridor space to host a photo gallery to show people how the work progressed. We spent one evening looking through hundreds of photos to try to narrow them down to the 46 we could have. In the end, we could not do that, so compromised initially on having about 75 in a photo album, eventually narrowing the choice down.

The 46 photos in the photo gallery were then enlarged (at a very good price, courtesy of Stan Plus Stan Two studios, to whom thanks are given) and we embarked on the next difficult job: choosing photo frames. We bought a selection of frames and discovered we all like different things! Eventually, we settled on a gold frame with an ivory coloured mount and Wilkinson’s manfully dealt with our online bulk order.

The fact that my husband is an engineer and my son a maths student proved useful at this point. Knowing how many photos would comfortably fit into the space involved the ‘golden ratio’ (no, I didn’t understand that, either) and measuring from the floor upwards (all the photos are at the same height, regardless of if the picture is portrait or landscape) and across each wall, so that spacing is consistent. As I say, maths has followed me everywhere recently!

Garry then spent the next X hours (where X seems an incredibly large number) cutting out caption holes in the mounts and sticking in captions to describe the photos. There were times when it felt like our house was being over-run by photos and frames! Time was also disappearing far more quickly than our ability to finish framing photos, but in the end, the photos were hung on Thursday as we had the Open Day on Saturday…

The final 46th photo will be of the official opening, so I’d better get on with sorting that out now!