I know that I have said this before but it really will be a short blog tonight on account of the fact that I am totally knackered. My day started early when I drove to B & Q to pick up some Polyfilla for Hilary to use in the kitchen where she needed to patch up some of the plastering that I did years ago when we turned a pantry into a loo. I used several pieces of plasterboard and didn't join them together very well but the worst parts were hidden by a radiator. Now that the radiator is out all my plastering defects are apparent hence the need for lots of Polyfilla. I actually made two trips to B & Q today, the second was to pick up some plastic waste pipe and fittings and these are the reason for my knackeredness (oo the spell checker didn't like that word).

Tony was with us all day again today and had arranged for the new boiler to be delivered along with miles and miles of copper pipe - slight exaggeration there, but it looks like a heckuva lot of pipe. We decided to place the packaged boiler in roughly its final resting place and that meant that we had to move the fridge/freezer, and the washer/drier. Hilary helped me move the fridge - first we had to empty the freezer's contents into the small one in the garage, them we had to take the doors off, turn lift, twist, push and pull it out of the laundry room, over the step and into the kitchen and put the doors back on. Actually it was a damn sight easier than getting it into the house when it was first delivered.

The washer was next and my biggest problem was moving the waste outlet as this meant getting a hole 40mm diameter through the block wall. Normally I would hire a core drill but this time I decided to knock through with hammer and chisel, so a task that would take a professional 5 minutes with the right tools took me the best part of 3 hours and that didn't include measuring, cutting and fitting the pipe. However that part of the job is done, now I have to concentrate on getting a much larger hole through the same wall so that we can vent the drier to the outside. I am hoping that Tony will bring his 4 inch core drill tomorrow and that he will trust me enough to let me borrow it.

One of the side effects of removing our heating is that we now look like Steptoe and Son's junkyard with piles of short stainless steel pipe, long stainless steel pipe, short and long copper pipe, an old boiler plus flue and finally an old copper cylinder. Quite what happened to the old plastic water tanks for cold water storage I have no idea, I expect that they are being recycled somewhere in the Tony Smith empire. I have photographed some of these piles and you should see them littered throughout this blog, if you look really carefully, remember what I said yesterday about clicking on the photos, you can just see my new plastic waste pipe that runs along the wall just below the steps.

While Tony and I were plumbing, Simon, Sam, Tom and Marcus were working inside upstairs with John the electrician so you can see that we had a full crew today - I hate to think what the wage bill will be this week. I popped up to see them occasionally, usually to see if they wanted tea or coffee, and most times they seemed to have lasers flashing as they tried to get the floor/ceiling joists in as well as the uprights that will form the walls of our new extended bedroom. You can see the results of their efforts in this last picture and judge for yourself if we got value for money from all these workers. Actually I can't really judge John's efforts, he is busy stringing wires all over the place and asking sensible questions about where we want power points and lights so I think that he is doing a good job. It will be nice to know that we have legal house wiring when he is finished as the present one is a mix of very old, old and stuff that I have bodged up.

It did rain a little today, enough for someone to move our gazebo closer to the construction site, and some rain is forecast for tomorrow when no doubt Tim will progress into the third round - tennis aficionados will know what I mean, but for us it probably means more of the same ie working in the laundry room where we have to move the shelves so that there will be space for our magnificent tank whenever it arrives - then roll on, hot water here we come.