I feel that I must apologise to my reader(s) for not blogging last night but we went out around 4.00pm to wish Hayley and Dan well on their forthcoming 6 month trip to Thailand and all points far east. We arrived back around 9.30pm and after a busy day I was just too tired to take photos and then get typing, but at least I can bring you up to date with today's efforts.

Yesterday Tony continued with his plumbing, Simon and Tom with the flooring and carpentry and Sam and Marcus with the roof insulation while Hilary and I started the day by going to Tavistock to get the wages for the last two weeks. It rained most of the day of course and that has continued today but at least we are working in the dry, the wettest of the group was Sam who was given the task of sawing the insulation into sizes called out by Marcus, but at least Sam was able to take cover under the gazebo. The result of all their work can be seen in the first photo and it shows just how big the extended bedroom will be. We will be having a small doorway fitted into the bay side so that we have some storage space available to us and a smaller access door on the other side so that we can get into the crawl space just in case we have a water leak or electrical fault.

On our return from Tavistock we found Marcus and Sam struggling with the sink, bath and lavatory from our old bathroom so when they had finished Hilary and I got stuck into clearing up their mess and deciding how we would tackle the removal of all the internal walling. This was how we spent most of Saturday and the next picture shows a totally cleared bathroom although we still have to take out the remains of the stud work, the old plasterboard and tug out a very heavy box of broken asbestos. We are leaving one of the asbestos walls up as it is in pretty good condition and we will probably have Tony dot and dab this with plaster and plasterboard, one wall is part of the main spine of the house but one of those that we removed was the divider between the kitchen and the old bathroom so if you look at the next photo carefully you should be able to see both rooms at the same time.

Tomorrow - Sunday - Tony has said that he might come over to do some more of the plumbing as he is finding that working with a crew of men is slowing him down, apparently they keep asking him questions. If the weather dries up Hilary and I will probably take all the bathroom rubble outside and add it to the pile by the gate, quite what will happen to our cast iron bath and the sanitary ware from the bathroom I don't know. Perhaps we can turn it into cash?

Just to summarise our present day existence we are living in three rooms; our living room which is getting smaller and smaller as we move more and more stuff behind the couches and squeeze them closer together, the kitchen which is now dominated by a huge fridge/freezer waiting to go into its final resting place and our bedroom which has a plastic covering over the carpet to try and protect it from Tony who needs access to the crawl spaces so that he can lay his pipes. Oh and we have the small loo opposite the laundry room which has the only working toilet in the house and the smallest wash basin that you have ever seen. Believe me we wait until we are very, very desperate before we trek from our bedroom down the stairs to get to the loo in the middle of the night, another working bathroom cannot come too soon for us. And did I mention that the only hot water that we have is from the kettle? Now that's primitive!