T O T K a t

The door to the old bathroom is boarded up from the outside. You can just see, peering underneath the door, that there is no roof, floor and half of the walls are missing. Well, OK, you can tell that from a 1/6" gap at the bottom of the door because there's daylight. Trundling around the outside of the house and, gosh, it's a wreck. Still, the mystery of the water main is now solved, though the problem not fixed.

We have lights in the loft room, but no power so I can't play with them.

The kitchen is a bit of a wreck too. It, and most of the rest of the house, is covered in a layer of plaster, brick and breeze-block dust. Everything is crunchy. I can just about cook still, but it's not easy.

Team A will be finished by the end of tomorrow, ready for inspection on Monday. But their plumbing will be finished by team B, whose doors were finished by team A who are much better at woodwork. It's all a bit swings and roundabouts.

...for the structure and fittings.

However, once that's done there is tiling and painting to do. That will take another couple of weeks.

No loo today (well, there is one, but it isn't bolted to the floor yet and is bucket flush and you have to go past 4 builders to get to it and 2 of them will hear you wee). The old bathroom is a hole in the ground with some walls and a roof. Probably won't be by the end of today. Boiler man comes tomorrow to work on fitting the new boiler. Reckon he won't be done in one day, so showers will happen probably at the swimming pool over the weekend, unless we have a new bath plumbed for cold water and waste by the end of tomorrow; we can boil pans on the stove then. I guess we'll find out at some point today or tomorrow.

New doors are almost all in, just the new kitchen one to go. I'm liking the new lounge/dining room one, despite the fact that it is ideally placed for bashing whoever is sitting at the end of the dining table whenever it is opened.

No plumber today though. Which is shit. No hot water still. And that's getting a bit boring now. (Plumber just turned up, apparently... I doubt he'll be done today as he has to replace a whole load of gas piping as well as run some mains to the new boiler and fit it.)

New chimney pot today though. And it matches, though it meant that the roofer had to drive to Cambridge to get a matching one.

The loft is really looking like a room now. It even has a door, skirting boards, windows that open and close. No lights yet though. The new bathroom has lots of pipes, not much floor...

It is so true.

I'm listening to Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (Britten, LSO, Pears, Brain). I really wanted to go and see the performance of this at the Proms this year but there are no tickets left. So, I dug out (actually the Alan Civil/Robert Tear version of) this and am listening to it now.

I was in a rage this morning due to various annoyances and setbacks; no hot water at home, inability to do simple things like get into the freezer without hurting myself because the second building crew are thoughtless, people standing on my toes in the tube and then glaring at me when I yelped in momentary pain. Which is a shame because I had rather a lot of fun last night, playing Stepmania (Dance Dance Revolution clone for Linux, Mac OS or PC) for a total of about an hour in a night of gaming.

The Britten is really helping. It's just so visceral. I love it (though I do prefer the Dennis Brain/Peter Pears version, especially given that's who Britten had in mind for performing it when he wrote it). The Tennyson, Keats, Ben Johnson et al. fits so well with the music. I can't do it justice in description.

No Britten for me.

The one Prom I really wanted to go to (and it's not even a "proper" one as it's a matinee at the Cadogan Hall), and there aren't any tickets left.

Friday saw the putting in of 1/2 of the floor in the loft bedroom and all of it in the en-suite. Saturday, we went to a wedding, in Wimbledon and the reception in Richmond. Sunday we went to pick up the bathroom stuff for the en-suite and buy the stuff for the main bathroom. Hung over bathroom shopping is the best way to do it; there's no vacillation around choices because you just want to get home and snooze/drink tea/eat bacon sandwiches. And the rest of Sunday was spent clearing out the bathroom and kitchen so that the 2nd and 3rd building crews can do their thing.

This morning, the 2nd building crew (the ones doing the bathroom maneuver) turn up. But they can't do anything because the 3rd crew (the plumber who will be removing the old and fitting the new boiler) is MIA with no idea of when he will actually show up. So when we raised concern about there being 2 crews for the whole job and whether they would be joined up enough, we really didn't see it coming that there would be 3. We knew they'd need to talk to each other, but it just didn't get organised by the building company.

Given how well it has gone so far (the extra 4-5 inches in the loft and the sufficient pitch in the soil pipe to get away with no macerator) it shouldn't be all doom and gloom. I guess we'll find out at this week progresses.

Came home last night to... "Ooo! Stairs!". It's all rather exciting.

I'm still a little disappointed at how small the room is going to be, compared with the current main bedroom. Losing 1.5m width to the ensuite is quite significant really. Still, we're off to buy the downstairs (1st floor) bathroom stuff on Sunday, so that'll be exciting. Saturday we're going to a wedding, so no time to play with bathroom china that day.

Building work is coming on apace. The loft is now room shaped. The second lot of builders came this morning for the bathroom and boiler work and it's all sounding pretty good. The only extras we'll have to pay for are the materials for block paving and the tiling work for both bathrooms. We'll need to go and buy the china for the bathroom at some point this week as the bathroom crew will be starting on Monday. And it looks like both lots of building work will finish at around the same time.

1 and a bit weeks down, just under 5 weeks to go.

It's starting to take shape. The plumbing goes in on Friday, also the electrics. The stairs work starts on Thursday. The timbers and steels are all done.

The builders have been really great so far. Really neat and tidy. They replace the roof tiles over the access hole at the front of the house, where the bathroom window will go, every night. The gang gaffer is really enthusiastic about his work and has managed so far to get us an extra 4-5 inches in head room, which is really good. We just really hope that he'll be as successful in getting the required pitch on the soil pipe so that we won't need a macerator for the waste in the bathroom. I really really don't want one of those.

We went to look at bathroom kit for the en-suite today and the shower tray is the key point for the plumbing work on Friday, we'll have that ordered tomorrow morning (after we've confirmed all of the stuff we scoped out today is going to fit in the bathroom) so the gaffer can pick it up on Tuesday or Wednesday next week.

The lower steel is all the way through now and boxed in. There's a platform above the landing and stairs and protective covering on the floor from the front of the house to the back and along the landing, firmly taped down around the edges. Which is nice. No idea what's going on in the roof as the front is still on and there's no way to see the back.

We are en-skipped. And the steel reinforcement for under the loft room floor is partly in. The other section will probably go in today. I guess then the builders can start to take the roof off. It'd be rather a good thing if it would stop raining for the 4 weeks after that please.

The scaffolding is up and doesn't look too scary. What was really lovely was that when I got home, the lounge and hall had been meticulously vacuumed; to a much cleaner state than when I'd left the house in the morning. And despite the dust sheets we'd put over things in the 2nd bedroom (soon to be the 3rd bedroom), there was an extra, large, plastic sheet thrown over as well.

A good start.

The skip arrives today and the new steel goes in across the ceiling of the 2nd (3rd) bedroom and across the landing outside the main bedroom. This is going to make sure we get 2m height in the new bedroom in the loft. 6 weeks to go, though it could be as many as 8 and there's no movement on the 2nd part of the project; moving the bathroom from the ground floor behind the kitchen to the current 3rd bedroom. No pre-meeting for that yet.