This week we have been having a slightly bitty week,trying to move things forward as fast as the weather and time available outside the cafe allowed.
I spent a day putting the insulation onto the inside of the stairwell on floor 1:
The scaffolders arrived during the week to remove their handiwork so that, at last, we can see ours:
We had a delightful interval on Wednesday when ex-neighbours Terry and Karen from Norfolk popped over for the day, so we redoubled our efforts on Thursday and began to extend the stairwell into floor 3:
As we began to install the stud work today, we did have a fun moment. Mike was trying to screw the top and bottom of the uprights in place and, all of a sudden, he decided the best way to do this would be to let himself down between floor boards onto the stud wall below. Oh, if only he had mentioned what he planned to do before trying to execute it – I would have warned him of the dangers of descending with one foot either side of a somewhat unsteady stud wall. It loses much in translation, but let me mention that Mike faced quite a challenge trying to extricate himself from his very undignified position in which he had very little traction, especially as we were both helpless with laughter at the time.
Once restored to the third floor, Mike and I continued to install the wall – but you might notice only one of use seems to be able to use the camera today…
Oh, and we still have some minor leaks in the house. This velux window is leaking somewhere but today was not the day to find out where, especially as the wind and rain were so strong, I wimped out of going shopping this afternoon.
My treat today (during spells when I had to find something to do as Mike was concentrating) was to demolish another en suite.
Above you can see that I had already partly demolished the bathroom you can see, but we needed to break through into the neighbouring bathroom (i.e. behind the radiator ), because as we install the stairwell, we would otherwise lose access to an exterior door in the room we are partitioning off in order to get rid of the many bags of rubbish we are generating.
Now we can just step into the bath and out again, and walk right to the door that you can’t see.
I hope this has all been crystal clear, and that you can see we will be ready for guests any day now – oh, I don’t know when, but soon, surely? Perhaps better to ask if you can guess what we will be doing next week!?!