So here we are eight working weeks since the diggers first arrived and we are counting the days until we have hot water again, I think that the hardest thing for me has been not being able to turn on a hot tap or shower. I can live with the dust, the noise, the constant Radio 1 music in the background but I would really like to stand under a hot shower and get rid of all the grime. My hair feels like straw and tonight I really must get some hot water in the sink and wash out some of the debris.

We were given homework by Tony tonight - well he said that if we wanted too it would probably be a good thing to remove the last of the asbestos in the new study. I think that he decided to do that to us after we surprised him by saying that we thought that it would be good to replace the study ceiling. It was a bit of a mess after we removed some of the old partition yesterday and Simon thought that he would have difficulty patching it, so between us we railroaded Tony into getting Tom to pull it down. No Sam today, Simon called at his house and there was no reply so perhaps he had a day in bed, but we did have Tom, Marcus and Tony - we believe that John the electrician will be in tomorrow. Tony and Marcus are both part time firemen and today they had a "shout" while they were working, we heard this very loud beeping and they both downed tools and rushed out the door, apparently the target is to be on the fire engine no more than 4 minutes after the beeper goes.

Simon concentrated on getting the new bedroom totally boarded out and he also did the new small landing cupboard, you should be able to see that in one of the photos.

Tony continued with the plumbing although he was a little miffed with me at the start of the day when I told him that he had got the pipes for the shower/bath at the wrong end. We were working to two different sets of drawings, one from the architect that Tony had upstairs and one that had been modified by us that Tony had downstairs. On this second set we had drawn in the right handed shower/bath that we had already bought. The problem was soon rectified and this third photo shows the first obvious signs of our new plumbing and right in the middle is the shower control box that we bought from Lowe's, no problem with imperial threads and metric pipes seem to have occurred so we will keep our fingers crossed that all will turn out OK.

My job for the day was to temporarily add some laminate planks to the kitchen so that we could move both the cooker and the fridge/freezer close to their final resting positions. Luckily we had saved some of the planks when we ripped up the floor in the old bathroom so I was able to cut a few up and patch them in. It was not easy as they were glued together and consequently they had to be carefully prised apart, the old glue scraped out and then the tongues and grooves slid back together. I also had to lengthen the cooker cable and got Simon to help me lift the oven in and out. We still don't have the water pipe connected up to the fridge but Tony has already laid a down pipe for it and we just need him to connect it up. We can't finally fix the cooker and fridge until Simon has patched the plaster on the wall behind them and we don't expect that to happen until he starts to plaster the rest of the walls downstairs, probably another week or so before that happens. Any way the last picture shows the kitchen in its present state, what you can't see is the film of dust that usually covers everything and the reason for that is because Hilary swabbed everything down shortly before I took the picture. OK that's it for another day, see you tomorrow when perhaps the new study will have some walls and a ceiling.