Sewers

The Master Plaster Blaster has been troweling two-handed like a demented one of those blokes on an aircraft carrier waving two bats around to show the planes how to land. When Richard and I were speaking on the phone about how pink and wet the walls were, Paula, his lovely partner, thought we were being rude. Cuh, womens' minds are like sewers.

En-Suite

For the moment, we are concentrating our efforts on completing the en-suite shower room. When this is done, we can use it while we partly dismantle the bathroom in order to finish that off.

Yesterday, Richard installed a shower pump in the airing cupboard, and we pressure tested all the plumbing joints on the shower system. Then we charged up the pump and ran water through it. Don't want to tempt fate, but it all seemed to work.

So today Rich set about boarding up the wall inside which all the pipes and wiring run. The shower has a deluge head, shown here without its head.

A wider view.

The loo will be snug behind the yet to be built stud wall which will form the third side of the shower enclosure.

Christmas happened....

....and by some miracle we got an upstairs bathroom in a usable condition. There may not have been any heating, or a bath panel, but the bath was in, the taps worked, and most of the leaks were fixed.

On Boxing Day I was first up, and the first job of the day was to empty the tray placed below the sink unit to catch the water leaking from the hot tap connection. Thought I'd go to the loo while I was there, flushed it, nothing.... No whooshy noise like you're supposed to hear. Uh oh, rising panic, get a grip.... Taps don't work, this is bad. Very bad. Its really, really cold in here... Frozen pipes! Aaargh! Off with the skirting board, on with the fan heater and hair dryer. Got it thawed out and working, no new leaks, before any of our seven guests even got out of bed. The whole world in fact was ignorant of my twenty minutes of sheer, blind terror. That's the way it goes.

In between the seven Christmas guests leaving and the five New Year guests arriving, I had one day to get the oak wash stand out, sand it down, get two coats of Danish oil on it and put it back in. It hadn't stood up to the hard use over Christmas with constant exposure to water from plumbing leaks and guests, mainly due to the fact that some silly twit had painted it with floor sealer instead of Danish oil because they didn't read the labels on the very similar looking tins. What a moron.