To my great relief I’ve got a week off work to make some progress on the house. I’ve some mixed emotions on this — glad I’ve got a clear run to swing a hammer but Mr H, my building expert and father in law is in London for the week so I’m without someone to constantly ask advice of.
I’m not totally alone, though. Mr and Mrs X and their children — our God children – have driven over from their place at station X last night and Mr X will be giving valuable assistance this week.
We went over reasonably early this morning — I think we meant to leave the house at 0830 but running around after children and general lethargy slowed things up a little.
Mr X set himself to work with the sledgehammer on the old kitchen fireplace after we’d tried our best to remove all the 1930s tiles for reuse elsewhere. Sadly a great many had already been destroyed by previous owners so my desire to recreate was dashed.
The fireplace had been behind a plasterboard wall, and behind the tiles was a concrete frame to hold them. Behind that was a great and poorly constructed brick lump, and finally beneath that was the original great arch that would have contained the cast iron range, now vanished.
Meanwhile I basically concentrated in the less interesting but important task of moving things. Mr G, my step father is coming Tuesday to lay some bricks and the lorry of his building materials is coming tomorrow, so I moved a lot of rubble to get ready for that.
To my great annoyance I also had to spend ages moving a run of cabling out of the way where the curved wall is going to be. Given I’m not in any way experienced with sparks this involved turning the power out and doing it, very carefully, in the dark Witt no power tools. Most annoying.
We had lovely pizza for lunch and then, once our days work was done headed home via the Chinese takeaway and the pub. No rest for the wicked…
The Young Revivalists 