We had a look around our garden over the weekend and decided that builders were messy beggars so while the weather was good we took the opportunity to tidy up after them. Admittedly it wasn't all their fault as a lot of the mess came from bits and bobs left in the roof by the previous owners including a couple of old pillows, a cot base, some broken doors and some very tatty loft insulation. We bagged it all up and took it all to Crowndale where to our suprise no one objected to our mix of broken roof tiles, bits of wood and smelly feather pillows. As Sunday afternoon turned out fine I cut the grass, but I guess predictably, the ride on lawnmower refused to cut again and I had to use our old push one. Trust me as soon as the manager gets into work on Tuesday morning he is going to get an earful! That machine has been trouble since day one and we are both completely fed up with it.

In a complete turnaround we had only two workmen today, Tom and Marcus and they spent all day cutting and nailing timber for the roof structure and sad to say I can see very little difference from the way they left it on Friday night. You can be the judge from the pictures that I took today. We learned from Tony - who has returned from France where he is restoring a 16th century farmhouse - that Simon and Sam were working on a new patio for the next door neighbours, but I think that it was also partly because 4 workmen in that small space upstairs get in each others way. We also learned from Tony that the electrician is coming tomorrow, we think to actually start work, so we need to get our wiring plans up to date for the whole house.

We had a small scare about our new round window today when Tony told us that we might have to get planning permission as it wasn't on the plans. I called the architect and he hummed and harred and wouldn't give a definitive answer but the gist of it was that we can go ahead and if any of the planners complain we should go for retrospective planning permission. We are still waiting to find out if the window is 600mm across the outside or 600mm across the glass itself, we prefer the latter.

Tony actually spent a bit of time with us today, probably because he needed money for wages and for Travis Perkins - apparently we don't have our own account with them, it is all being done on Tony's. We agreed that he would get the boiler from them and it looks as if we will soon be losing our central heating system as they need to drain the radiators, so although progress seems slow I think that it will all happen very quickly. The weather forecast is good for the whole week and we know that the new slates for the roof have been ordered so perhaps by the end of the week it will start looking like a house again and less like a building site.