Advice from a professional

We finally bit the bullet, and decided to get a professional round to have a look at the bathroom project. He agreed that we were in a difficult situation with the ceiling, and also that we had the right idea with regards the direction of the bath over the joists.

However, he has said that any spark who looks at our electrics will suddenly develop the 2mm gap between his front teeth for making that whistling sound when he draws breath upon seeing something he doesn't like. To install an electric shower, we would need to get a spark in to install the power ring for it - and that would have meant replacing the consumer unit. The whole thing would spiral out of control and we'd end up having to have the whole building re-wired. We can't afford that. Personally I'd like to have got the bank we bought the house from to do the wiring to bring it up to scratch. But there you have it. So it looks like the nice easy job of putting an electric shower in is not going to happen.

The plumber we had round instead suggested installing a power shower instead. They are probably twice the price, and will involve a lot more plumbing. You have to use cold water from the tank, rather than cold from the mains. And I'm going to have to plumb the hot water straight off the tank, rather than off the 15mm pipe that runs conveniently past my bath and basin.

These guys describe the system far better than I can:
DIY Doctor: Powershowers

In the mean time I'm going to continue to fit the bath and basin, so we can fit the shower when we've got the money etc together to do the work.

Our professional also advised us to get a builder to do the soil pipes for the toilets. It's a messy job, and it's all got to be done to building regulations. What we have at the moment may not even be legal, as there's supposed to be an air vent - which we don't have.

Worryingly, he also suggested that the downpipe from the guttering was currently being directed straight into the ground, meaning all the rain water would end up in the foundations.

Cookers

Oh and before I forget:
Thanks to the guys over at Meon Gas who came out and fixed out cooker! The only bit that's now not working fully (and we're not fussed about this) is the middle ring won't light from the built in ignition system.

Turns out the oven thermostat had died - probably from all the grease etc all over it, and the heating element for the fan oven had died too. At a cost of £170 we now have a fully functional cooker, which would probably have cost us well over £600 to replace. To add to that, we'd pretty much built the kitchen round the cooker. It's a weird 700mm size - so we'd have ended up buying one that was only 600mm and had a big, very odd looking gap down the sides of the cooker. Good result

Bathrooms - a long road ahead

The bathroom is an interesting challenge. For some reason the roof is constructed in a funny way, resulting in a partially sloped ceiling in all of the rooms. Some would say because it was fashionable at the time, others (myself included) would say it was because it's cheaper to build them this way - you need less bricks to build up the walls. This is particularly irritating for several reasons:

1. The loft space is smaller, both in height and width.
2. If I were to ever try and stand up in the area at the head of my bed, I'll bash my head on the ceiling (fortunately won't ever happen :)
3. It makes locating the bath upstairs very difficult.

We can't put the bath along the wall I wanted to put it on, because the ceiling invades the space. We could build a box cupboard at the head of the bath, but then the foot of the bath would stick out too far and into the space where the stud wall is going to go. We can't put it along the wall where the stud wall will go, there's not enough space for the door and the bath. We can't put it along the other wall - there's a window there. Not too keen about the idea of showering by a window, even if we are eventually planning to block that window off. Leaving us with the last wall - and a slight crazy plan to build a long box cupboard along that wall the length of the bath. This has the added advantage that the bath will then be supported by three joists, close to the load bearing wall. So we're less worried about the bath crashing through the floor as my wife fills it with water. Don't laugh - apparently in some older houses it's been a problem!

Anyway - finally got the room cleared, and some floor boards up. Conveniently some of the boards have already been cut so its easy to see where pipes for some things are. But not all of them. I managed to break a few getting them up, which is annoying. I started on the plumbing and had a couple of disasters, and a couple of successes. We've decided to take the rather large (and very nice) towel radiator out of the toilet downstairs and move it upstairs, and move the radiator points out of the toilet and into the downstairs bathroom. There's a corner sink in the bathroom at the moment, which we're going to move into the toilet. This will free up some space in the bathroom for when we convert it into a study. The start of the disasters occurred first when I forgot to put flux on the pipe coming up into floor space from the new location for the radiator, resulting in a dry joint. So I had to take it all apart and resolder it, wasting half an hour or so.

I've disabled and hidden one of the power points, which would have been under the bath. The other I'm leaving for now so I've got access to power, but that too will have to disappear beneath the floorboards. I've worked out which is the hot and cold pipes, added tee pieces off them and run the pipes up to the wall. I've learnt how to bend pipes without kinking them too much. The idea is that you put a steel, dense spring down the middle of the tube to stop it from collapsing. You can then bend it over your knee or put it in a pipe bender. If I were a professional plumber I'd definitely invest in a pipe bender. It's a machine with a long lever and a gentle curved groove allowing you to bend pipes with relative ease and produce nice, good looking pipe work with a degree of accuracy I struggled to achieve by bending the pipe over my knee. Or you can cheat and buy solder ring obtuse angles - a piece of copper pipe moulded to 135 degrees. If I'd had a disaster with bending the pipes, I'd have probably gone over to using obtuse angle pieces. But the two I've bent worked out fine - so two successes :) The only problems occured when one of the pipes was a little too long so the bend was too close to the wall. But that was just a case of cutting the pipe a little shorter. I've added some ball taps to cut off the water to the bath/shower/basin supply in case in the future I need to change a washer or something - saves having to drain the whole system down. It also means I can pause with the development of the bathroom, without having to leave the whole house without hot or cold water.

We're stopping for until today to get a bathroom fitter in. Several things have occurred to us:

1. The bath will be directly over where the consumer panel is - and all the power to the rest of the house comes up right where the bath is. If there's a leak it'll drip down onto the live electrics. I need to know if that's going to be a problem!
2. The plan is to put an electric shower in. But electric showers draw a LOT of current and therefore must be on their own fuse in the consumer panel. We can do this one of two ways:


• Use the only space free which is currently labelled as the cooker ring - not that we use the cooker ring, we have a gas hob and electric oven. No need for a seperate ring
• We replace the consumer panel to include more fuses


I'd love to go for option 2 as we'll need to upgrade when we build the extension on the side of the house (whenever that will be). But it could get costly, especially if the spark sees a lot of problems with the existing wiring and may insist on a more extensive wire replacement program.

3. We also need to know about the soil stack for the toilet. Where can we put it? etc. The toilet has to go on the back wall. Otherwise, when we build the extension, we'll have to move it.
4. I need to get my friend Lau over at some point as I need to hire and use a power tool I've not used before - a diamond edged core drill designed to cut holes in walls so we can run the drains from the bath and basin. It's a rather expensive tool, which we're going to have to hire at the cost of £50 or so per day.

In other news, my wife and I have decided to put some decking off the kitchen. It's a rather large area, but it gets very little sun as it's a south facing house. The grass and other plants don't do very well round there, not helped we think by four teenaged boys living there before us! It has the added advantage that when we finally build the conservatory, we can always move the decking to another part of the garden.

And finally, we dug over the veggie patch yesterday afternoon. It's the first weekend when it's not been very frosty, snowing or raining. It was actually a pleasant afternoon - though my right shoulder and hands are feeling the effects this morning. At some point I'm going to have to install the replacement water butt. The current one (which is 210 litres) is full - we've have that much rain. So when I saw one in Wickes for £99 - at 700 litres I figured I might as well do the upgrade and move the 210 l one down to the house. When I got to the check out, I found out they'd further reduced it down to £49. Nice work if you can get it! Now I've just got to build a stand to put it on. The ground behind the shed is very sloped and when the water butt is full, I'm worried it will damage the shed by leaning on it!

Final stages of the kitchen ... and then the bathroom

The kitchen floor is almost finished. My wife finished the last few awkward tiles, and has now grouted the floor. It's a black tile floor, with grey grout. It looks fantastic when it's finished, but there is a problem. The grey grout takes months to wash off. The very fine cement it's made of shows up very well on the jet black tiles.

This weekend we start work on the upstairs bathroom. We've got to clear the room out first, take up the floorboards and see where the pipes etc are. There's a little electrical work to do - mainly taking out old electric points. And we've got a stud wall to fit. Got to get the bathroom suite delivered before we put the stud wall in though - I can just see us putting something through our nice shiny new plasterboard wall!

Sheds and laser guided power tools

Finally put the finishing touches on the roof of the shed yesterday. The roofing felt is all battoned down, and the guttering is fixed so it will start collecting rainwater for the veggie patch.

I'd seen an advert for a pillar drill on the internet from the supermarket Aldi (along with adverts for power winches - that shop sells the weirdest things!). No true workshop is complete without a pillar drill and a lathe. Well for £41 I figured I might as well get one of the boxes ticked. I went over there on Wednesday, only to discover that they weren't going to be available until Thursday. I was going out on Thursday evening, and Friday I was on an extended shift - so I wasn't going to be able to pick one up till yesterday (Saturday). So I went back over there in the morning - and they'd sold out and they weren't going to be getting any more in.

So I consoled myself by going to buy a new powered mitre saw. The other one had served me well. I'd put the kitchen together with it, and quite a lot of my wife's shop was put together with it. But it was on its last legs. The catch that pulled the blade guard up had broken off in the last throws of putting the kitchen together. Since then I had to make do with pulling the guard up by hand before making the cut. This struck me as being a rather dangerous situation. I'd seen first hand (pun intended!) what can happen if someone missuses one of these things. I figured it was time for an upgraded anyway, so I trotted over to the nearest B&Q, and bought a new one. One of the problems I'd had with previous incarnations of the mitre saw was that it was limited in how thick or wide a piece you could cut. You will always have some limitations - and they can easily be overcome with a handsaw. But I use the mitre saw so much, I figured why not kill two birds and get one with a bigger range of movement. And I have to say it's a pleasure to use. I bought the MacAllister £68 one, which has the blade gantry mounted on two sliding rails. One of the bugbears of previous mitre saws has been the difficulty with changing the angles the blade comes in at. They both had rather twiddly little knobs to lock down the turntable with. I either over tightened which made it difficult to loosen, or under tightened in which case the angle of the blade could change just as I was going to make the cut. Neither a great situation. The new mitre saw has a much larger handle right at the front, and the range of movement of the gantry is much wider - going out to 50 degrees where previously it would only go as far as 45. In addition it has a laser guide on it. Now I've always viewed laser guidance on powertools to be a bit of a gimmick which you could (or should) probably ignore. I retract that - at least with regards to the mitre saw. It has two laser lights, which I think need adjusting a little. But never the less it was considerably easier to build the new garden gate as a result of the lasers. The oblique strut supports had some odd angles, and it was reassuring to know exactly where the blade would fall as soon as I started. All in all - a good result.

Still want a pillar drill though.

Sheds and bad weather

Having finished putting the roofing felt on the new shed, but not quite finished battoning it down as it was getting dark I made the fatal mistake of thinking the job was done for now. But no. The english weather has conspired against me, and tore off some of the brand new felt. So I was fixing that back on, and doubling the number of nails I've used. Unfortunately it's meant I've had to over lap where the tear was. Which means the felt might not reach as far as the battoning will allow. Time will tell.

On the plus side, I have found some time to start outfitting the workshop. We managed to keep the old kitchen worktop intact and relatively unaffected by the weather etc. I've put to beams along the wall just under the window, with the worktop on top of that. I've only put a couple of legs in. The worktop is in two parts, originally to go round the corner of the kitchen. I'm going to straighten that out, but it does mean an extension to the horizontal beams I've put in as they aren't quite long enough. Not a major problem really - just another trip to B&Q. The worktop will extend most of the way to the back of the shed, so I'm going to put some shelving in so it extends all the way down. I've also got some of the carcuses from the old wall cupboards, which I'm going to hang, probably on the back wall of the shed.

Next stop the power systems. To permenantly run a power cable out to the shed is going to be expensive. I'd need to change the consumer unit in the house, and add a fuse - then run the cable down. At some point we're going to have to change the consumer unit anyway, but not just yet. So I'm going to get a 12 volt leisure battery - like you get on boats - some solar panels to recharge it, some 12 volt florescent bulbs, perhaps even a motion sensor and a light detector so it will switch itself on and off appropriately. That will provide lighting.

I'm also considering getting an 2kw inverter so I can run my tools off the 12v battery. A couple are rated above 1kw, so I'm going to go for a 2kw inverter - should be more than enough and allow for more powerful tools later on. I'm going to set it up so when the battery goes flat and can't power the inverter anymore, I can just unplug the shed from the battery and plug it into an extension cord coming from the house.

More on Chimneys and sheds

We had a fire lit for the third time on Monday. We'd been advised to get a CO monitor for the bedroom. It's right above the living room and used to have a fireplace in it, but there's no guarentee that when they bricked it up, they did the job sufficiently to prevent CO from coming back down the chimney and poisoning us. As they are £5 for two in B&Q at the moment, I figured that wasn't an issue as I wanted one for the kitchen anyway. The fire took a couple of hours to get going, but when it did it was so hot I was down to my t-shirt for the first time!

The roof is now on the shed - with a bit of a patchwork of roofing felt on it. The felt that came with it was so brittle it was damaged in transit. Unfortunately several of the planks which made up the roof were rotten, as were the battons which supported them. This is not entirely unsurprising give the age of the shed! So a quick trip to B&Q, and I've bought some new sheet material. I've also taken the slightly brave step of modifying the shed a little. Being 6ft 1, I would have cracked my head on the horizontal support beam. So I've put some more leaning supports in, with some horizontal beams higher up. The only problem with this approach is that the original horizontal beam was preventing the walls from bowing outwards under the weight of the roof. Time will tell if my approach is too detrimental. It certainly will be less detrimental to my head!

Sheds and Chimneys

Had some friends over yesterday to try again to put up the shed. We've got the sides on which is a feat in of itself - especially the side with the glass windows which was incredibly heavy. And all this with the wind starting to pick up! Now all I've got to do is put the roof on which is going to be problematic. It's incredibly heavy as each part of the pitched roof is ship lapped planking screwed to the support beams. Some of the planks need replacing because they are rotten - though fortunately they are the end planks so shouldn't be too difficult. I am however, contemplating replacing the roof with some kind of fibre boards, sealed then with roofing felt.



We've also had a bit of a blow with the chimney. We had the sweep round to look at the chimney to try and workout why the smoke is back flowing. Oh dear. To start with there was a huge birds nest in the chimney. Melody had a bin bag full of twigs come down as soon as they started. Apparently the company have been out to the house a number of times in the past, and even recall putting a bird cage on the chimney before! Then as he was sweeping, a brick fell down the chimney which gave them both more than a bit of a fright. This might turn out to be a more serious issue, and we've been advised not to light a fire in the grate. Lucky we've got the central heating working. Unfortunately when the sweep checked the chimney with a smoke flare, we were still getting back flush, which implies a more serious problem. So they are going to come back and have a look down the chimney from the top, and perhaps at the same time fit a bird cage to stop more nests being built.

And finally, apparently we will need to line the chimney before we can use the woodburning stove. Although it's apparently a relatively quick procedure but will cost over £1000, and then we'll need to adapt the stove to suit the chimney. So I guess we won't be getting the wood burning stove up and running any time soon!

The gas man returneth

We've finally got the gas meter changed over from the pre-paid meter to a proper meter. No more messing around with having to go to the local co-op to get buy more gas.

The plumber also returned last night to fix the boiler. It turns out our cat had better instincts than the plumber. For weeks our cat has been going outside and staring intently at the flue for the gas boiler. One time, we even found her on top of the boiler in the kitchen. We couldn't for the life of us, work out why. There was no obvious sign that there was a nest in there and we'd not seen any birds flying in or out of the flue. Turns out the reason the boiler wasn't working was because at some point a bird had got in and out of the boiler, but had obviously spent some time there as some of the air intake was blocked up with bird poo! So a bit of cleaning later, and we have a fully functional boiler and a warm house at last. Melody is ecstatic.

We've also finish the TV cabinet in the living room - pictures coming soon :)

Heating

The immersion heater element is installed, and it didn't blow a fuse straight away which is a good thing. Waiting to see now if it actually heats the water!

The gas man arrived, and checked out the boiler. Looks like one of the parts which detects air flow is faulty. The heater works ok which is a relief, and the gas man's coming back to replace the faulty part tomorrow.

The Gas man cometh

We've got the gas man coming over later on today to see if he can resurrect our boiler. I don't mess around with gas - too easy to blow up your house that way! We'll see how that goes.

Immersion Heaters

So it would seem replacing an immersion heater element is remarkably simple - provided you have the right tools. The Ultimate Handyman website lays it all out for you. I would however strongly suggest paying out the £3 for the immersion heater element spanner (or borrow mine now I've bought it!). My father lent me a chain link spanner, but I couldn't put enough force behind it to get the element undone, and I didn't want to break the spanner by tapping it with a hammer. So £3 in B&Q later (lucky we got LOTS of B&Q vouchers for Christmas this year) and 5 minutes with a hammer later and the element is out. There was a lot of corrosion and limescale on the element, and the electrics at the top were obviously burnt out. Glad it's nothing too serious. I am going to have to buy a new bit of cable for it, as that's burnt out too.

There is some very sound advice on the above website, which I'm glad I took heed of. When you're unscrewing the element take care not to try too hard with the spanner - use a hammer and a bit of WD40 or similar oil. The tank is made of very thin and soft copper, much softer than the element or the fittings around it and it's very easy to sheer the threaded part off your tank. All you can do then is replace the tank. So your task which would cost you £20 could suddenly cost you £200! Not to mention ending up with 120 litres or so of water spilt all over your airing cupboard.

Turns out there are only 2 sizes of elements realistically used in the UK - 11inch and 27 inch. Screwfix sell two of each of the types - one for hard water areas, and one for softer water. I have no idea what the difference is, aside from the cost. One word of warning from the Screwfix website - don't forget to remove the shipping clips from the heating element before you install it.

More updates!

So many updates, so little time!

• Our immersion heater has died, and our boiler is still not working. So we don't have any hot water :( Our kettle is boiling over time!
• We now have a (mostly) functional cooker. The oven has always worked, although it doesn't seem to cook at the right temperature and the fan at the back is very noisy. The two maybe related. The rings are gas powered, and until recently weren't connected. We were on our last canister of gas when the gas man came back to put the cooker on. We now have three rings out of five, and the other two should just need a bit of a clean with a wire brush. At least we can now use gas to heat the water.
• We've booked the gas company to come and swap out the old pre-paid gas meter for a normal meter. The electric meter is already a normal meter. Why would anyone want a pre-paid meter except in a rented house?
• Next we want to move the electricity meter so it's in a much more convenient place.
• The TV unit is almost finished and even though I say so myself, I'm very proud. It's a dream given form! All I've got to do is put the doors on and all the messy computers, broadband kit and TV will be hidden from view. Pictures to follow!
• We've fitted dimmer switches in the living room and bedroom
• The bedroom, living room and kitchen now have black metal chandeliers - which came out of the shop when Melody shut.

I feel like we're really making head way, but we've got a long way to go. I feel like I can relax after a hard day at the hospital without having to worry so much about the state of the place!

Sheds

So we had some friends over yesterday to try and put up the shed (which is only 12ft by 8 - my bad). We're putting it up on pylons to prevent damp from collecting underneath. What I didn't realise is that the back of the vegetable patch where we're putting the shed, is about a foot higher at the back than it is at the front. So we've got substantially more paving slabs at the front than at the back. And at near £2 a pop, that's rather expensive. And we're now going to have to build steps to get into the shed :( We took so long getting the base level that it got dark before we could put the sides and the roof on. At least now the parts of the shed aren't going to kill the grass - we've stacked the parts on base out of the way. That's going to have to wait for another day.

Broadband

YAY! We've got broadband at the house AT LAST!

Too much stuff!

A bit of a frustrating day yesterday for Melody. She wanted to put more time into the kitchen to try and finish up some more of the decorative facias and so on, but couldn't find any of the door handles. She's spent half of this morning clearing out the cupboard under the stairs looking for them. At least it meant when I got home last night there was a lot more space in the living room as she'd gone through many boxes looking for them, and putting things away as she went. It didn't feel quite like we had the sofas on one side and a wall of boxes on the other with a narrow walk way between to get through to the kitchen.

We put up the other chandelier in the kitchen last night. It's the same as the one in the living room - black metal, which goes very well with the black floor and black worktops. Hmm - do we have a thing for black or what? The only problem with the chandeliers are they give off a phenominal amount of light. We're going to have to use up lighters in the corners of the room if we want to use energy saving lightbulbs, or be wreckless with the environment and install dimmer switches. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if you can get two-way dimmer switches.

Updates galore revisited

Melody had a productive day yesterday and achieved the impossible! The cupboards on the walls in kitchen are now all square. Today she will probably be hanging the remaining doors. Then all we have to do is add the cornices and fascias and we'll almost be done. The end of the kitchen project is in sight! Jobs left to do:

• Re-jig the pipework behind the washing machine, as it's currently pointing in the wrong direction, causing the washing machine to stick out into the kitchen.


• Tile in front of and around the washing machine


• Add the fascias and cornices, and sealant to the bottom of the kitchen units


• Tile round the back of the kitchen units


• Put up the cooker hood

But at least at the moment we can put away all the plates and cups without getting brick dust and plaster all over them :) We need to get the gas man back in to re-connect the cooker and test it is working, as the camping stove we're using is running out of gas, and we're finding it more than a little frustrating cooking on just the one ring.

I've got the lads coming over on Saturday to help put up the enormous garden shed my parents gave me. 12ft by 14ft should give me quite a lot of space to store all the stuff associated with hobbies, and still give me some space to do woodworking etc. It is going to take quite a chunk out of the vegetable patch though, so I can see us extending the vegetable patch to reclaim some of that lost space. At some point I want to put a greenhouse in, which is going to lose yet more space either to the garden, or the veggie patch. It would be helpful to have the two close together so they can share the guttering for the waterbutt.

Updates galore

I've not posted in nearly two weeks now as we've not got 'net access at the new house - how have we survived? So many updates, I keep on having to go back to see what I've already written about.


When you buy a repossession house, first thing you should do is change your telephone number! It's taken two weeks to get the number changed, and during that change over time most Internet Service Providers won't touch you with a barge pole. We've had to change the number as we're still getting phone calls from aggressive debt collection agencies for the previous owners, and we're just not interested! We don't have contact details for them, and frankly we don't want them either.


I've had two weeks off work to do all the DIY, but it's wrecked my hands. I can barely feel anything at the moment with either index finger, and the skin is so dry the industrial strength skill moisturiser I use at work just soaks in - which is unusual as I normally need to wipe a fine layer off my hands. Lesson learnt: Wear thicker gloves, not just the latex ones!


What else has been going on? Well:

• The ground level kitchen units are down. The doors and facials are on most of the kitchen units, although a little more work is needed on the cupboard that houses the dishwasher
• The work tops are on the kitchen units - which was nerve wracking (more below)
• The floor in the kitchen is mostly tiled. There's a couple of extra bits to do and then it needs grouting. It's mostly square, although there are a couple which are on the pi$$ a bit.
• We've discovered the walls aren't in anyway shape or form square. This is particularly difficult when you're trying to hang cupboards on them. Currently all none of the cupboards are level in both directs - there are big steps. We might have to take them off the wall again, bolt them together and then but them back. Hmmmm - not sure that's going to work either :(

Lessons learned:

When you buy waste pipes, and attempt to fit them using 'solvent welding', make sure you use pipes that are designed for it - it won't work otherwise! Solvent welding is a quick, cheap and easy way of getting waste pipes to fit. You apply a very smelly solvent to the surfaces that you need to join and then push them together. After a few minutes the solvent will have evaporated leaving a water tight seal (in theory). But only if you buy pipe which is compatible with solvent welding. Without realising the differences, I had bought the type of pipe you can't solvent weld, and then wondered why it wasn't working. Fortunately you can buy push fit joints as well, which are quite difficult to use - much harder than solvent welding. So if you can stand the smell of the solvent - buy the solvent, pipes and joints. You can also buy compression joints, which are very easy to use but cost 3 or 4 times as much.

Worktops

So when the £450 bill for your worktop arrives (or more - it's a very expensive piece of your kitchen), you think great - a major part of your kitchen arrives. Then it slowly dawns on you that you've got to cut great big chunks out of it. One corner of the kitchen has a support pillar running through it, and of course there's the kitchen sink to cut too. I did the corner cut first, and spent over 2 hours doing some templates to try and do the cut right. In the end, it came out ok, but it's lucky we're tiling and putting some sealant round that corner as the wall's crooked. (No surprise here).

Then there's the sink. The template that came with the sink didn't match the sink we'd bought. So it was kinda lucky my Father insisted we measure up the sink to make sure! And make sure you have enough play on the flexy hoses coming out of the water system to go into your nice new taps. I suspect we'd have had problems even if I had put enough copper pipe in, as I wouldn't have been able to reach up past the sink. I ended up adding an extra bit of flexy pipe onto the plumbing so we had enough maneuverability. All in all, not a terrible job, though a professional would have had it done twice as quick and probably wouldn't have such a large gap down the back of the worktop. Still, we can correct most of that when we tile the splashback - when we finally get round to it!

The bedroom is mostly sorted out - realistically we just need to put up the curtain pole and we're all done in there. YAY!

I've spent a few days putting floorboards in the loft. At approximately £5/square metre, they are not cheap. But it's all down now - just in time for Melody to shut her shop and move all the remaining stock up there.

More updates soon!

Floor Sanding

That floor sander was a lot of fun - and incredibly effective. We got ours from Brandon Tool Hire. The guys there were very helpful, and even though they didn't have one at the centre I went to, they phoned round and found somewhere that did. When I got to the place to pick up the unit, they talked me through loading the belts on. The belts and dust bags are all sale or return, so it doesn't matter if you've not used one before and don't know how much you're going to need. The varnish we're using suggested using P120 sandpaper on the floor, so we got a bunch of belts at P120 grade, and some more at P80 for the more stubborn bits round the edges. You need to remove all the old varnish, and that can clog up the P120 belts really easily. The sander has three wheels, two at the back and the roller/sander at the front.

Lessons learnt:

• When you switch it on, pull down on the handle so the drum isn't on the floor. If you're not holding on tight, it'll run away from you
• Don't leave the sander in the same place for too long, it *will* cut a divot out of your floor!

The rosewood varnish my wife selected looks great - although I'm quite glad I didn't gloss the skirting boards yet!

Kitchens - revisited

With the screed now dry, it has become obvious that the pipes are leaking because the screed doesn't look dry under the pipes. They are also too close to the wall for the new units, which means when we finish installing the new units, the pipework will be behind the units. So I'm going to have to learn how to do soldering too. We're also going to have to do a little work in the electrics, move one of the points further up the wall so the fridge freezer can be powered, and a spur hanging off one of the other points so we can power the washing machine and dishwasher.

The units are coming along nicely. The plans Wickes gave us aren't quite right - they've sold us too many units. There's an annoying pillar in one corner of the kitchen. Wickes suggested a 800mm unit for that corner, and then cutting the corner out of the unit. On reflection, there are two better alternatives. It's a 600mm gap or there abouts. So you could put in a 600mm unit and have it flush with the wall, and hang a 400mm door off it. Or you can put a 400mm unit in the corner. As we don't have a spare 600mm unit with a 400mm door, but we do have 400mm unit - we're doing that. We're hoping we can return the 800mm unit Wickes sold us, and get some money back. They aren't cheap!

We've also noticed Wickes have sold us a larder door, which we think is supposed to go in the corner covering the electricity meter. But the door is clearly designed to go floor to ceiling. Does that mean we're going to have to cut the door in half? I don't think so.

We're going to have to put the kitchen on the back burner for a day though as we've still got the floor sander, but it's got to go back on Monday.