Ratty

This is Ratty, drilling some more holes in our nice violently green wall to run another cable. He's a brilliant electrician, and much more beautiful than Sparky was. I expect he's called Ratty because when he's been in your house it ends up looking badly gnawed. He'll be here on Wednesday moving some cables he's already routed because his clients changed their minds about where they are going to put their bed. The blighters....

Mess

I thought I should share our chaos and discomfort with the wider world. Why should we have to suffer alone? We are doing all six rooms in the main part of the house (3 bedrooms upstairs and 3 reception rooms downstairs) so we're having to keep moving from one to another, and most of them have a pile of furniture in the middle, and all of them are covered in dust, and none of them are remotely nice to be in yet.... This mess is like no other mess we've ever experienced. It is the uber-mess, the mess to end all messes.

The mess in the spare room...

The mess in our bedroom....

The mess in the study.... That's another fine mess we've gotten ourselves into.

Expanding foam and Kryptonite

When we ripped out all the gaudy tropical hardwood window surrounds, we found that the wondow frames fitted by Country Window Systems in Dunkeswell, Devon, were actually only held in by silicone and thin air. Great job guys, I thought you did it quickly. So we've splurged in about ten quids worth of expanding foam into each window surround to hold the blighters in.

Now the expaded foam will hold it tight, and insulate the gap. RIchard would prefer if it was fixed in with eight inch titanium bolts anchored into Kryptonite, but he's a belt and braces kind of guy.

Here's Richard plastering away again in Miles's room (long story), which as previously mentioned, is not his favourite job. But its Friday, and he's off camping for the weekend with some of the boys from Culmstock, so I expect to see him here at about eleven on Monday morning, with large gaps in his memory.

Plastering

Rich doing what he hates. Plastering. As opposed to getting plastered, which he loves.

Lounge

Apart from having the entire house rewired by Ratty (who is coming to run some more cables tomorrow so I'll try to get a snap) we are also applying extra insulation to all the exterior walls, of which we have many, and although they are cavity walls, the extra insulation will cut the heat loss by more than half.

We were able to simply peel the paint off the wall in the lounge as it was the kind of vinyl paint that was popular in the '70's. After seven years, it was about time we redecorated anyway.

Once the paint was stripped, Richard, yes, he of studio and bathroom fame, could get to sticking up insulated plasterboard. This has 50mm of extruded polystyrene stuck to the back of it and its £30 a sheet.

The wooden window surrounds have been consigned to history, and we now have nice wooden cills and plastered reveals.

But going to Spain wasn't the only reason this blog hasn't been updated for months....

Life has been very complicated on many fronts lately. But while we were away, Ratty came and ripped up all the floorboards, drilled loads of holes everywhere and left cables dangling out of them. Ratty is our new sparky, he's not nearly as ugly as the old one.

Here's the fuse box with lots of new wiring ready to connect once a new consumer unit is fitted.

And a couple of examples of cables sticking out of holes.

We've been in Spain.

We saw some spectacular rocks.

We stayed at a nice campsite where we upset some Germans and made friends with some other Germans. We might have mentioned the war once, but we think we got away with it.

And we buried Arne.