…until the carpets arrive. The culmination of two and a half years of work is now almost in sight…

This week, we tiled behind the bath when, to our astonishment, we found we had run out of tiles! A quick break in proceedings to order more tiles – which, of course, are not available locally so we have to wait for delivery later this week – and then we turned our attention to the floor tiles…

In between cutting the fiddly bits for the edges, I found myself looking around to try to assess how much more work we have to do. Carpets arrive on 24th July, and yet we have walls that still look like this.

Even worse, we have floors as above – you can just see the ‘double’ floor which we have had to cut through. In places, we still need to refinish the ‘lower’ floor which is then covered in builders sand (preserved in the bin liners you can see lying around) before the ‘real’ floor is finished on top, since the sand is a very good baffle against sound transmission.

In the hall, you can see walls and floors that still need a little attention.

On a brighter note, the floor is now tiled and, whilst the glue dried, we worked on the ceiling in the adjacent room.

We put more insulation in place and plaster boarded after Mike had fitted the wiring for the fire alarm system.

This last is my personal favourite from this week. I spent much of this week painting the stairwell and spindles between floors 1 and 2, so things are gently coming to completion. We have put fireboard under the stairs, but this left us with a rough plaster board ‘edge’ to disguise. Here you can see how we have finished over the joint with a piece of beading which I think has done the job nicely. Only a few coats of intumescent paint and then all will be ready for Building Control to consider and, hopefully, sign off!

My apologies for putting our laundry arrangements on display, but one of the real delights of this week has been watching Lola (on the right) begin to come to terms with Boyd (on the table) having the upper hand. Lola is incredibly insistent that she would really like Boyd to play with her. Boyd, on the other hand, is unbelievably restrained when he bats Lola away. Claws are rarely seen, so we suspect both parties are having a good time. Given how Boyd used to pester Jasper, our previous dog, to play, we can’t help feeling there is some karmic rebalancing underway in Plas at the moment.