Today was Tony's last day at the house, and he managed to finish everything he planned to. All we have to do now is decorate a bit - paint the bathroom, treat the new doors etc. Henry also managed to hang a new door in the bedroom, which was a bit of a bonus!
The bathroom is very nearly finished now, with the door and toilet-sink being the only things left to do..
The building is coming along fast and furious, though the Reading Festival has eaten our builder for this friday so it probably won't get finished this week. The bath is almost completely finished now, the sink is on the wall and plumbed in, the floor has been leveled and laminated, and the radiator's on the wall.
The remaining jobs list is getting smaller, and now only features getting the shower enclosure up, building a door for the room and adding a small sink to the toilet room.
The bathroom is coming along swimmingly, with a Friday finish looking quite probably now (finger's crossed!)... The tiling is all but finished now, the shower tray is in and looking good, and the door is being bricked up as we speak...
As you can see from the photos below, the new bathroom is coming along nicely. The progress has started to be really visible, with the biggest difference (and most annoying for the builder!) being the blocking up of the old back door, which has now been done - from the inside at least. The bath is now set in place and plumbed in, the shower tray is also in place and all the plumbing is ready to go.
We also had (yet another) visit from a British Gas engineer - this time who who seemed to know what he was talking about - so we now have working hot water as well. What a bonus!
Finally, after having most of the suite sat in the garage for the past 6 months, the building work started on the new bathroom today, with an absolute shed load of work getting done by our fantastic new builder Tony Allwood. The first day's progress including ripping the entire suite out of the old bathroom, blocking up the passageway (to save the house getting covered in dust), taking the separating wall down and putting up some new plasterboard. Job's a good'un!
The ivy that climbs up the back of the house finally got too much for Simon and Sarah upstairs today, as it had started to creep in the window on their landing, so we decided to take action today. Having got permission from the guys in the bottom flat next door, we headed in to the wilderness that is their garden and hacked down all the ivy. We've sprayed weed killer all over it so hopefully it won't come back any time soon, but with that sort of plant you never know!
Well the time has come at last for the new carpet to be fitted - after almost a year of having bare floorboards in both bedrooms (slippers a must!) we ordered a new carpet from the nice people at Carpet Right and had it fitted it this week. Since Henry is off on 2 weeks holiday from work, we had the time we needed to move all the furniture out (it got spread between the garden, garage and round the rest of the house). Thankfully the weather stayed nice for a short period of time, so the matress being in the garden didn't matter too much.
It took us 2 days to move the furniture in and out, and all of about 1 hour for the carpet fitters to weave their magic. Still, it was worth all the work in the end - the carpet looks great, particularly in the master bedroom, and there were enough off-cuts left over that we could (temporarily) lay some down in the hallway until we get that done.
One consequence of moving all the furniture round was that Sara's wardrobe finally needed replacing. The bottom legs broke off when we remove the carpet originally, and when we emptied it to move it we realised just how bad shape it was in. So a trip to Ikea was needed (including a tedious hour waiting at their new large-furniture collection centre) and we ended up with the bigger wardrobe you've ever seem - over 2.3 metres tall. Honestly, you can see how big it is in the photos below, but if we ever need anything off the top shelf I think we'll have to get a ladder in!
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