Finally some pictures

Well, I finally got to survey the estate, camera in hand, this evening. Here are the results.
What you can see here (slightly garbled by technology) is

1) the full depth of my new kitchen (hee hee) from the new outside wall, to the yellow wall 16 feet away on the other side (chortle).
2) the study ceiling. Nuff said.
3) and 4) the productive bits of the garden continuing to be productive. This is nothing to do with the building, but inexplicably cheering, nonetheless.
5) the utility room at the back of the house waiting for its new roof. With luck, we'll be watertight by the end of the week, on that side at least!

Where did THAT week go?

Yoinks, suddenly it seems about a week has passed with no update. An inexcusable lapse, my blog audience, for which I can only apologise. Anyway, if it's any consolation, you've missed out on a fairly uneventful period in the project.

Not.

Well, you already know that we escaped the cold, wet bank holiday weekend by visiting my parents. What is not, perhaps, adequately clear is that just as Paul the Builder and his team had left for the weekend, we identified a small problem. Not only were the controls for our central heating stuck in a largely-unreachable kitchen but, due to the peculiarities of our heating system, it would be unusable anyway. All the work done removing radiators had led to a lot of water from the central heating system ending up in carpets and buckets on the ground floor. Not, inherently, their natural habitat, nor particularly productive. This meant that we wouldn't have working heating for the weekend.

Hence, a retreat to my parents' seemed sensible, even if it meant 7 people sharing 3 bedrooms. We decided that the couples would stay together and the children would share a room, although the amount of sleep most of us got suggests this was largely an academic matter (with apologies to any academics reading this who might object to their chosen profession being used synonymously with "completely meaningless")

However, all such inconveniences were, largely, forgiven and forgotten when we returned home to discover that the temperature in our house was an arctic 10C. That's 50F to those of you still struggling with decimalisation (or otherwise afflicted, eg with George Bush's education system). Even the time our central heating packed in on Boxing day a few years ago (different house) and we couldn't get it fixed until the new year didn't quite compare to this. Words fail me for a description of how miseable and uncomfortable that night was, which is slightly unfortunate for a blog, so I shall change the subject and move on.

The rest of the half-term holiday week limped on in predictable fashion to the extent that the only thing that really sticks in my mind was the point when half the ceiling in my study decided it had had enough being up there and concluded it wanted to be down here. So down it came.

Now, living through the building work has left me reasonably immune to the bangs and crashes of construction. Needless to say, my level was reset at the moment a bucket full of bricks, mixed with soaking roof insulation material and plasterboard all decided to make themselves fully aquainted with the floor around me and the edge of my desk. I'll try not to play the drama queen about this but OH MY GOD A BRICK LANDED INCHES FROM MY HEAD.

Madam will claim that more of it came down near her, the next morning, but that was clearly several feet away and far less dangerous. Mind you, as a way of getting me out of bed in the morning, the rumble of falling masonry and a scream is as effective as it is unwelcome.

Typically, as these things increasingly seem inclined to do, this initially happened scant moments after Paul the Builder and his team had left for the day. A full and frank exchange of views was conducted on the phone that evening and we concluded that they'd take a look at the rest of the roof at that end of the study and in the adjacent cloakroom and decide whether it could be made safe enough to let us continue to use it, or whether we'd just be better leaving the house now and not coming back until some time in July. Gulp.

They decided it could be made safe, by the simple expedient of pulling the entire ceiling down (on the reasonable grounds that if it's been pulled down, it can't fall down). Since when, we've been showering and shi... abluting even more alfresco, with a plywood and tarpaulin roof.

So life went on. Walls were built, some bits of them were knocked down and rebuilt (don't ask) and, for a while, the house was mostly water tight and not looking like it was about to jump out and attack us.

Clearly it had succeded in lulling us in to a false sense of security. Again, just after Paul the Builder and his team had left for the week, I noticed a slight absence of hot water from the tap. I even checked I was using the right tap. I was. I got my best hiking gear on and summoned up my courage for an assault on the south face of the old kitchen to investigate whether the boiler could shed any light on the situation.

It could. The boiler was telling me it was knackered. The quaint little flashing red light and fault code were my clues. Another frank exchange of views on the phone and it was agreed that one of the lads would come back on Saturday morning to try and fix it.

I wasn't quite prepared for this to mean that he'd drop by at 7.45am, clamber into our bathroom and fiddle with the water pressure, shrug his shoulders and drive off before I could get to him to explain what actually needed doing. So, a weekend without hot water. No problem, we'd go to my in-laws and use theirs. But wait, what's that you say? Their hot water is knackered too. But of course. Handily they had an electric shower we could use, but it wasn't going to win too many fans among the children (and didn't, if the screams of terror I heard from my bunker at the end of their garden were anything to go by).

Another Monday rolled around and I attempted to explain what the actual problem with the boiler was and - one electrician and two "heating engineers" later (I think that's what plumbers are called in Buckinghamshire) - we had a working boiler and hot water.

Ready to stumble headlong into the next problem then, clearly. Which I suppose would be a good moment to mention the rather sheepish look on the face on one of the builders when we got home from the school run. Apparently they'd "dropped a bit of wood". Now, to me, that means a twig or small bit of rubbish. Clear warning that I'm not cut out for life as a builder. What they actually meant was they'd dropped a 5 foot long plank into our shower cubicle, cracking the base of it and breaking the shower curtain pole off the wall.

So, with the smell of silicone sealant hanging heavily in our nostrils, we battle forward.

Now, Paul the Builder always had an objective to get rid of the enormous, well, thing in the ceiling in the study. It's basically a 3 ft part of the old end wall of the house that hangs down, almost cutting the room in half. Now, I see his point. Unless Tracy Emin is going to put her name to it, it's neither use nor ornament, but I'd have been prepared to leave it in place for the sake of a quiet life.

However, Paul felt compelled to see if he could get rid of some of it - by moving whatever structural beam it contained upwards. Apparently it would just be a one-day job of knocking some plaster off, exposing the beam and then moving it upwards, then I could have my study back.

So out came the chisels and sure enough, it wasn't long before they'd struck the next problem. Saw that coming, didn't you? The structural beam it contained wasn't a structural beam. Now, OK, it wasn't exactly a string of Silly Putty, but it clearly wasn't up to the job of supporting the new bits of house that would be above it.

Paul's solution was to recommend a new, proper, steel beam be obtained and installed. The benefit (apart from the whole "your house won't fall down" thing, obviously) being that the ceiling in the study will be completely flat. The downside being that we won't be able to use the study "for the rest of the duration of the build" said Paul, calmly.

So, here I sit, in my combined living room / office / playroom / toilet / kitchen store room, rewiring the network (for the second time in two weeks) and trying to work out whether anyone will notice if I try and sneak my main tower PC in here, behind a chair or something.

Still, I suppose, on the plus side, I'm now working in a room with my stereo & TV so I should finally be able to listen to some music (of which I have not done enough since we moved here) and catch up on all the DVDs unwatched on the shelf. Equally, I can now network up the Xbox which will hopefully be useful eventually.

Well, that was a wall of text. More exciting photos of walls and scaffolding will follow soon. All I have to do now is work out which box all my leads are hiding in, so I can get the photos off the camera and uploaded here.