I don’t really have any ‘good’ photos to show you today, but I hope these inelegant shots show some of our continued progress. Below is the heap of timbers that we had rescued from the roof we were dismantling, and which needed processing to firewood…

…and here is what was left when I packed in for the day later on!

Shaun has now put the finishing touches to our sitting room fire place – we hope you all enjoy the wallpaper as much as we do.

And below you see younger daughter Pips, who assisted at various Easter services this year, complete with the lamb that was blessed at the Easter Sunday service. I had hoped to include some photos of the pair of us abseiling down the church tower but unaccountably I can’t find them at the moment…

Over the Easter holiday we have been very busy with hospitality work, but some building work has continued. Below you see Mike repairing the roof…

…. and here you can see that all the slipped tiles have been encouraged back into the correct position. The other big news this Easter is that Pips has got…

…her first dog. Freddy is absolutely adorable.

I hope to be making a second posting shortly, as soon as I can lay my hands on the missing photos…

I start this blog with a little local colour. Charley was visitng for a few days recently, so we took both Charley and Pips for a day trip to Beddgelert to see the faithful dog’s grave…

…and from there on to Harlech to see the castle. As you can see, we didn’t have to dodge the showers on that day!

Whilst in the castle, Mike and I did the wall walk, and it was fun to look down and see Charley and Pips, sitting back to back in the sunshine, taking their ease. The exciting news that arrived last week was that Tom and Kate…

…got engaged! Turns out it wasn’t too wet in Yorkshire either, as the hoolahoop rings lasted from that heady moment of commitment all the way home…Many congratulations to them both!! Very proud parents wish them every happiness in the years ahead.

Anyway back to work, Whitey! To remind you, we removed the roof last week, during a spell of wonderfully settled weather, so it was a huge surprise last Tuesday to open the door to find there was snow in our house!

This now is the last time you will see the corridors and individual rooms of the single storey extension as was…

…because we called in our local contractor friend with his digger…

…and he arrived ready to push the internal walls over.

He started off carefully knocking out the walls to expose the remaining steels which were then carefully lifted to ground level…

…after which there was something of a free-for-all to knock the walls down.

We took great care to disconnect the internal and external walls at their junctions where they looked to be properly tied in, but a surprising number of the walls succumbed to a pretty pathetic tap showing no evidence of any tying, so we are kind of glad we decided to take this step…

…but it was still a shock when I returned from a local shopping trip to find approx 80 tonnes of rubble on the floor, and it was too late to reconsider!

What on earth will we do now?!?!?

I will be showing some pretty ugly shots later today, so I start with a shot Yvonne took of Lola on a walk. I think she is ready for her close up…

Meanwhile, back to the roof. Once we had removed the tarpaulin, the roofing felt, the stirling board and the stramet board, we were down to the glassfibre insulation which we removed to reveal…

…roofing felt on top of the plasterboard, and also quite a series of metal lattice trusses and wooden joists.

To try to give you a sense of scale I include this shot, and to give you a sense of how unpleasant some of this work was…

…we offer exhibit (a) – can you identify which of the black bits are rat poo, and which are decayed scraps of the hot water pipe insulation (which was quite possible gnawed by the rats)…

…and exhibit (b) – the electricity cable which had been chewed through in several places, and those places all showed evidence of scorch marks.

Anyway, by this stage we had revealed all the water pipes, electrical cables and other services which we stripped out…

…and then stopped for a coffee break!

By the end of last week, we had pushed down all the ceiling plasterboard, and begun to remove the trusses and joists so we could see the sky…

…and just as we downed tools, we noticed that some of the net curtains were still in place! These will come down one day soon, I have no doubt, along with the rest of the ceilings and joists…

… which, as you can see in this shot from the second floor suite, is nearly all down.

To help you relax after all this footage of destruction, here’s another shot of a border collie we see around here occasionally…

Lola, Queen of the river!