Isn't it amazing that all the work that you have read about so far has occurred in five working weeks since the builders first drove their digger across our lawn to start digging out the footings, I think that they have done really well even if some days it seems that progress is slow. Today was one of those days, Hilary and I were out just about all day and when we returned it was "Ho, Hum O look one side of the roof is finished." We went out for lunch at Pat's in Exeter as it will be Hilary's birthday tomorrow and Pat kindly offered to make lunch for us, well Celia her mum actually made it and jolly nice it was too. We stopped on the way to Exeter at Trago Mills to look at ideas for shower trays, as you probably have guessed by now we are concerned about how big the shower can be in the master bathroom and we have started to consider offset quadrant style units instead of rectangular ones. We did see a couple of those and we may go back and buy one of their enclosures but we have a couple of concerns about the tray itself. The first concern is the height of the tray as most of them are made of plastic capped stone resin and are 3 to 4 inches high where we really wanted one that is 1 inch or thereabouts. The second concern with the Trago shower tray is the position of the waste outlet which is at the front, close to where you step in, and this may be too long a run for Tony to carve into a concrete slab base. The good news is that the enclosure is pretty good, a little bit shiny but we think that we can tone that down and make it closer to the colour of our shower fittings. But we did find a 900mm square base and folding door that will fit into the smaller of the two downstairs bathrooms, so we bought that and picked it up from Trago on our way home - another thing for the workmen to work around as they continue with their renovation. We actually got the pieces into the house by pushing them through the window of our now unused bedroom where they rest against the vanity units that are waiting to be installed.
Our two pictures tonight show Sam's new bridge over the leat and the side of the roof that has been completely tiled. Just before Simon and Marcus left today they were working on the lead flashing that will run in the valley on the other side of the roof where the bay roof and the new roof join together. By Simon's reckoning the roof will take another week to complete as it involves a lot of slate cutting, we are hoping that he has overestimated that and he will complete it by the weekend. We would certainly like them to get moving on fitting out the interior partitioning and putting up plasterboard on the walls. We were warned again by Simon that Tony would like us to move out for a while, partly because of the noise and dust that is going to be generated when the bedroom ceilings come down, but also because it would make it easier to do the wiring and plumbing if they had full run of the house. We will resist moving until the last possible moment and will certainly make our stay away as short as possible. We have already had to remove several bales of roof insulation from the garage so that we can get to our freezer and we are noticing that breeze blocks, slates and building rubble from the house next door is gradually being added to our own rubbish out on the moor, so our fear is that if we move out we will lose total control of our house. It ain't gonna happen folks!