I have to confess that Hilary and I weren't around much today so we left the workmen to get on with it. Simon, Sam and Marcus turned up first followed a little later by Tony but we saw nothing at all of Tom or John the electrician. We weren't surprised that Tony was late as he did as he promised and came over yesterday, arriving around 11.00am and leaving close to 4.00pm, he put in a load of new pipes and when we saw them today we were very impressed with how neatly he had laid them out. We went out first to Tavistock to take a load of rubble to the tip at Crowndale, this was mostly from the old bathroom where on Saturday Hilary and I ripped out all the tiled walls and the plasterboard partition that I had built some years ago. Then we drove into Plympton to use the launderette, we were running out of clean knickers and our washer/dryer has no electrical power until John gets down to that end of the house.

With the laundry done we went to CarpetRight, Wickes and B & Q to look at carpets and flooring, now we have to wait until Thursday week for someone to come out, measure up and give us a final quote. We had pretty much decided to have wooden floors throughout the kitchen, lounge and study but the CarpetRight guy threw a spanner in the works when he said that we would need to have a threshold between the kitchen and the living room to allow for expansion. This destroys the whole concept of a continual flow between the rooms and we will need to discuss this with the rep when he comes next week. We did see some nice flooring in all three places but our favourite was at Wickes and unless we get a super good deal from my mate Warren at CarpetRight we will try and find a local fitter of solid wood flooring.

Instead of settling on the flooring we ended up buying two lighting sets, one for the new diner/bedroom and one for the dining end of the kitchen. Our local B & Q is reorganising and has loads of stuff on sale so we wandered into the lighting department and found these two units reduced to a total of £18 instead of £60, we are really pleased with them and think that they will look great in the newly decorated rooms.

On our return from shopping around 4.00pm we discovered that Tony had already legged it but that great strides had taken place in boarding out the walls of the new bedroom upstairs. This first picture shows how the walls are looking and the only change that we can see that needs to be made is for another couple of electrical sockets on either side of the bed head. We are hoping that Simon will be allowed to finish the upstairs and get it completely plastered so that this room can be used before they move downstairs, it would certainly be better for us as we could just move across the hallway while they do the wiring and plumbing in the other half of the building.

The second picture shows how derelict our old bathroom has become, it has now been cleared right back to the walls and before long the window is coming out to be replaced with a larger one that is clear glass instead of semi-opaque patterned. We discovered in our clear up that over the years the old loo must have leaked at the junction where the pan meets the floor and so some of the wall timbers had rotted out. Marcus took about 5 minutes to knock all the old wood off the wall and said that tomorrow he will take down the ceiling if we cover all the stuff in the kitchen. It seems as if we will be in for a dusty day tomorrow.