Mulching Schmulching

It's been a couple of hectic weeks. The was away for 2 weeks, leaving his very capable and lovely son to manage the job. Rob was finishing off rebuilding the front of
the house, only to find he'd managed to put the window back off centre!! Rob has now put it back to its correct postion and has promised me he will start plastering next week.
The plumbers have completed first fix. We were having a few problems with mains pressure but Severn Trent water are going to replace the lead mains pipe in the street to a wider one. The builders will also have to dig up the drive to lay a new feed from the street to the house (hopefully this Saturday).

All the render has now been removed from the side wall. Its been acid cleaned and is back to its original red brick state and looks great. I'm thinking I'll have a go at repointing whilst the scaffolding is still in place!

The Spouse and I have been busy: I've been stripping and sanding the exterior stone work in preparation for decoration. Balancing on the scaffolding has been quite hairy at times, but managed not to fall off. The Spouse has been going over all the interior walls removing any final scraps of wallpaper in preparation for plastering.

Thanks to Fox who has been helping out in the garden, he's cleared most of the flower beds and getting rid of loads of crap that was left behind. It's starting to resemble a real garden!

Last weekend was a joy; Ben (The Spouse's Brother-in_law) arrived with his chain saw to chop down the 8 leylandii that were an eyesore and too close to the house for my liking. I'd like to say it went smoothly, well it did in terms of no one lost any limbs. But it was a bit hair-raising at times. The Spouse ended up holding a rope that was tied to a large tree which desperately wanted to fall into the neighbour's garden. Ben and Fox narrowly diverted a potential disaster by coming to his rescue. We were gutted to find two very stunned baby birds and their nest in the debris, but we helped them to safety and haven't seen them since. After a full day of cutting down trees the chainsaw blade became blunt and we had to stop. Ben is returning on saturday to finish the job. We are also hiring a mulching machine to dispose of the waste responsibly. (If anyone wants weed free mulch for your flower beds you can come and collect this saturday between 11am - 4pm).

Bathroom SHOPPING!

Whilst we were away Rob the builder erected the stud wall for the 2nd floor bathroom. Its gonna be a good size bathroom and doesn't impose too much on the two bedrooms.

This has been a very exciting week in terms of spending (although I reckon the Spouse would disagree!) I met the builder on tuesday in Nottingham to purchase all the bathroom fittings. We manaaged in the space of 3 hours to buy all the fittings for the 3 bathrooms and 1 cloakroom. And the builder is not one to hold you back when it comes to shopping.. (if only the Spouse was this good at encouraging me to purchase shoes). I won't bore you with the details of my purchases now as they will hopefully emerge via this blogg in the not too distant future.

The Spouse, the builder and I met up again on thursday to purchase the tiles. The builder took us to the Nottingham Tile Warehouse in Stapleford. These guys are amazing and have some fabulous stock. I would put a link to their website here but don't have one. Am VERY happy with everything we got here and can't wait to see it in situ.

Bang goes the contingency fund.

Grenada was amazing, really recommend the Spice Island Beach Resort to anyone considering a holiday in Grenada, it exceeded all our expectations. The Spouse, Phil, Mill and Mo all managed to get their PADI's. I attempted a dive but only managed 2 metres before hyperventilating and clawing off the instructors face... never again!
The builder called me towards the end of our first week with the bad news that the front wall of the house needed rebuilding from the 1st floor up. The original survey hadn't detected the problem despite the fact that the wall was sagging over 3 inches out from its original position. We may possibly have a case for suing the surveyor, which would at least enable us to recoup the costs of remedial work. But this has also put us back at least 2 weeks. : ((