The weather outside wasn't so frightful, and our painting skills were delightful.

Instead of spreading comfort and joy, we were spreading Creocate, and a lovely job we did too.

We had a pleasant evening reflecting on 2024 and thinking forward to 2025, and what looks to be a very exciting January Challenge!

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas, and see you in the new year!

After some last minute cancellation chaos (and Dave's post-work dash to B&Q, we met up at Buckland Family Hub for possibly one of our most unusual tasks to date.

Our job was to to wood treat the large wooden pirate ship in the Hub garden. It was quite a daunting task, but despite a number of late drop-outs, the hard-core team completed nearly the whole ship!

By the end of the hour we were potentially a little giddy on Creocate fumes, but had certainly got an old ship looking ship-shape!

There was plenty of chat about upcoming tasks, brush-based innuendo and a tale of a turkey-driven rugby tackle in M&S.

Thanks to the super team that came along this evening, youre all amazing!

We had our first session out for our new collaboration with Home-Start this evening, getting ready to jazz up the Family Hub gardens across the city.

Our primary task this evening was prepping the external fences for a paint job, which involved not only sanding down the wood, but removing a delightful layer of moss as well! Jane, Dave and Katie made some new friends that they discovered in the wood grain - check out Bert and Ernie in the pictures!

Judy and Jen were Team Table, sanding down and sprucing up the kids' picnic benches with a pallet of blue paints.

We also used the forces of nature to aid out prep and clean up, with a found stick becoming a marvellous paint stirrer and some soggy leaves to mop up splodges of paint from the concrete!

Team Gazebo were back in action during the Family Festival pack down. Tracey was also back on the litter picking and the site was looking phenomenal within just 45 minutes of the event finishing.

GoodGym also came to the rescue of one of the stall holder's vans, which had gotten stuck in woodchips during the day. With some muscle and some other helpful bystanders, we managed to push the van out of the dirt and onto the concrete path.

Stewarding at events often looks different, but Dave definitely went above and beyond on this one!

During the festival, he took on the role of Stomper, one of the mascots of Portsmouth Libraries' Stomp for Stamps active kids initiative. He got to show off his dance moves, high fives and fist bumps, keeping the kids very entertained!

He was also able to take Pudsey Bear out for a stroll to meet the kids, and supervised him during an archery lesson!

On top of all that, he was blowing up endless balloons and handing them out, whilst Tracey spent an epic amount of time picking litter and generally keeping the site clear.

We had an early start helping Home-Start set up for their Family Festival.

The dream team assembled an insane number of gazebos in less than two hours, and helped lots of charities get their stalls set up too.

We also bumped into Wilson and their dad out with Portsmouth Joggers this morning - always lovely to spot a GoodGymer in the wild!