Happy Christmas!!!!!

For tomorrow.

Our Christmas present to ourselves is a completed extension!!!!!!!

Kitchen fitter finished on frdiay morning, as did the plasterer. Kevin the plumber actually turned up on friday afternoon and did everything he was supposed to. John the electrician came round on saturday. He didn't finish then, so he's back today. Only a few hours of tradesmen to go....

We've got a washing machine again! And a downstairs water-supply!

We've got a small snaglist of things to sort out: leaky gutter; wonky lead-flashing, missing door-handle, but its nothing to stop us getting it all cleaned up, ready to decorate. I might get a few more pics up, or I might wait, in a Grand Designs style, and give you a grand finale in the New Year. But that partly depends on how much painting we get done next week.

And relax.......

A thousand years errosion in one weekend

Remember this?



A needle gun has got to be one of the best power-tools I've used in a while :-)
Not bad eh?

All we want is a kitchen sink...

Somewhat annoyingly, we've got 2 and neither are in place.
So on friday we had the joiners in, hanging the worlds tackiest internal doors (more on that later) and the kitchen fitters made a good start:



I picked up a needle gun from our local tool-hire shop and made a start on the dining room mantel-piece. Its very satisfying, blasting the whatsit out of a piece of stone :-) Hopefully IO'll be finishing it today.



Yesterday (saturday, the electrician came and wired in the mains sockets, some of the lights and the underfloor heating - its very odd walking on a warm flor. But nice too.
And the kitchen fitters came back and got a fair-way on.





We spent the morning hunting out toilets and basins for the cloakroom and choosing nicer internal doors. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find semi-glazed 4-panel doors! It seems that if you want clear glass, you have to pay through the nose for oak or similar wood, but if you want a cheaper, pine, door, you have to have frosted glass with a pattern etched in, and the really cheap moulded doors come with frosted glass with a really nasty pattern. Yuck.
So we're not having 4-panel glazed doors after all. We've got solid (moulded) doors for the cloakroom and utility room, and these glazed doors for the kitchen, dining room and lounge (which needed replacing anyway)

Driving me crazy!

Although it does look quite good:



And this is our future kitchen:



Note the plaster drying out.

All good. Except Kevin stil hasn't been to fit the gutters....

Plastered like Paris

The plastering was finished yesterday, so you can get a better idea of the shape and size of the rooms.
They'll look bigger once the plaster is dry (which will take forever with no heating in there) and more so with the walls painted white.
Floor-tiles get grouted today, driveway gets block-paved today and the kitchen gets fitted friday & saturday. :-)

Dining Room, Kitchen and Utility Room:

Kevin strikes again!

The notorious plumber is up to his old tricks.

He turned up several hours late on monday afternoon, so only had time to move the soil stack in preperation to fit the gutters. He did move it, but made a right mess of our recently re-pointed wall in the process:

What a weekend!!!!!

It all started on friday morning. At 6:45am, when the floor-tilers arrived.
Follwed at 8am when Freedom Electric arrived to move the meter and power supply (cutting the power to the house for the day. We also had the joiners, putting up the rest of the woodork for the plasterers, the roofer and the electrician, who ened up being here until 8:30pm! And he still didn't finish.

On saturday, John the sparky was back at 7:30am to nearly complete the wiring. He didn't quite finish as he had to go to the Newcastle Utd match. The plasters turned up at 8:30 and made a cracking start. It was definitely cracking as they pout a hole in a hot water pipe, soaking the underfloor heating insulating board. I think I've saved the rest of the floor though.



They also cut the phoneline (again!) because the wires were "in the way"



But they came back on sunday with a mate who could fix both, to avoid a costly visit from BT

I spent until 11:15pm stripping the rest of the wallpaper yesterday, so now the room looks something like this:



Hopefully the plasterers will finish today. If John turns up on time.....

You floor me.

Not as much progress as we'd hoped due to a small amount of miscommunication at the builders merchants, but progress nevertheless.

Its getting hot in here....

Well it could do, now the underfloor heating is in place!

This is how we looked last friday:





After a busy couple of weekends with assistance from very helpful friends, the kitchen and dining room is now gutted to a shell, so the floor-tilers have been able to start work. First tiles should be laid tomorrow....



And if you're wondering what we're doing for a kitchen (microwave, kettle and toaster) in the meantime, here it is: