And on day 59 there was light, well in some of the rooms anyway - the "old" part according to John's description - and just to prove it you can see from the first photo that we have a new light in the dining end of the kitchen. Remember the fluorescent tube that we had? The one that had no cover and was covered in dust? Well this little baby is now in its place, it's grand isn't it? What you can't see is that the ceiling is in a pretty bad state with half of the ceiling paper off, lumps knocked out of it where pipes have been forced through and, as we discovered when the kitchen end lights were installed, part of the ceiling is made of hardboard! But the best part of it is that it works, as do the lights in the conservatory and the living room. What joy simple pleasures like flicking a switch bring to people when they have been without electricity for weeks. What we would really like is to have some light and some power in the study, which as the next photo shows is starting to take shape.

Most of my day was spent cutting and fixing shelves to take our mountains of photo albums, we did retrieve the shelves and the uprights from the store over the weekend but had to go to B & Q to buy some brackets as we couldn't find the old ones in our Plympton storage unit.

Our weekend was completely taken over in laying the flooring, tiling the shower cubicle and painting the wall boards for the master shower. It was not physically demanding if you exclude climbing up and down on a chair to reach the topmost tiles, but by the end of Sunday we were glad to stop. We were supposed to go and see Hilary's friend Pat in Exeter but soon realised that if we were to complete the work in the time that we had available then an afternoon out was impossible. However we completed our homework and we were rewarded today when Tony and Tom started the installation of the loo and the double vanity unit into the master bathroom. This last photo is just an indication of how it will look, what you can't see is that Tony also installed the shower head and the shower controller into the cubicle - if only we had hot water we could try the damn thing out!

We have hopes that all the work will be concluded by the weekend as Hilary overheard Tony talking to the troops and it sounded as if they are really going to push for completion before we go on holiday. To do so they will need to put a bomb under Marcus who seemed to do very little today, I caught him chatting on his cell phone twice today and Hilary saw him applying little dabs of sponging to the walls and looking very bored. He is a nice lad but doesn't seem to have his heart in the building business, I don't get a detailed breakdown of the wages to know what we are paying him but whatever it is it is too much and if we ever had Tony do another job for us I would ask him not to employ Marcus. To be fair he was good at the foundation stage and obviously was skilled in operating the mini digger but his other building skills are limited and Tony has to keep him motivated if he wants to get the best out of him. 'Nuff said.