It's 10.00pm and Hilary and I have just finished our homework for the night so sorry but there will be no detailed blog with pictures tonight as I am too knackered. When Simon, Marcus, Tom and Tony finished tonight at 6.00pm our work started, they had a very productive day with Simon finishing the upstairs bathroom plastering as well as the cupboard plastering. We set Tony a puzzle fitting the American waste system to an English bath and this did take him some time to figure out, but it did result in the bath being taken upstairs while he figured it out. Tom and Marcus spent most of the day getting the downstairs bathrooms ready for putting in plasterboard and Simon closed his day out by putting trestles all over the floor of the study so that he can start plastering tomorrow.

While they were working we paid a quick visit to B & Q to buy some gloss white, white emulsion, underlay for the laminate floor in the upstairs bathroom plus some odds and ends that we also needed. As soon as the workmen had gone Hilary opened the huge drum of Magnolia paint that Simon brought with him this morning and set out to cover the entire new bedroom in a base coat ready for a final coat as soon as it has dried. Part of the reason for the hurry to paint is that Tony needs to hang the radiator under the window and we need to paint the wall behind the radiator. While Hilary was painting I got out the Black and Decker Workmate, a tape measure, pencil and saw and laid the laminate flooring in the upstairs bathroom, it was reasonably straightforward and I only made a couple of mistakes which were soon rectified, however it took longer than I thought and the last cuts were made by the light of the lamp outside the garage door. I will post a picture tomorrow provided that I can get some power to the laptop to keep the battery charged up.

Let me explain - all hell is due to break loose tomorrow as John is removing all the permanent power to the house and we will be limited to running all our electrical goods via extension leads. Priority will go to the freezers and the kettle, we know that we will be without a cooking oven until he finishes the wiring, if we are lucky we will get the telly going and may have a spare socket to keep the laptop charged - but no lights either so no reading in bed! What can we do to amuse ourselves?

Also arriving tomorrow are some more windows - we don't know if the round window is among them, but I doubt it - and the infamous hot water tank. This latter item was another cause of our late night as in order to get the tank into the laundry room we had to take out the dryer - which now resides in front of the temporarily redundant cooker in the middle of the kitchen. When you say your prayers tonight please spare a thought to your dear friends or relatives who will be deprived of electricity for the foreseeable future.