Creating fish kettles....

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Back on the jobsite, and now in rebuild mode, after a month of frantic tear out, the team is reduced to self and RHB. One of the reasons for this is that this is Mike's version of a finished piece of work:




As someone who has in the past been known to "bodge" things, I can understand that Mike was thinking "Well, it is only a cupboard at the very top of the stairs in the furthermost corner of the house". My objection to this monstrosity is that while I may have occasionally bodged things for myself, I've never done the same for someone else AND THEN PROUDLY SHOWN THEM THE WORK AS IF IT IS NOT AN ABOMINATION. Bear in mind dear reader that this is supposed to be a finished piece of work, and that, our design did not include dirty handprints all over it. In short, Mike is off the project.

Andy, Nel's partner in work, has gone to Tanzania, and unlike Mike is welcome back to site whenever he chooses. Andy was fun, diligent and intelligent and promised to help out when he comes back, which is good news.

The next picture represents a confession. The last time this room was shown, I had just framed it out - it is our nearly en-suite shower. In the current picture you can see the correct moisture resistant drywall (green), the new channels for the hot and cold feeds that I chiselled out of the cold, hard brick, and the two cunning recesses which will be build into the shower to hold shampoo etc. What the picture does not show is that I kinda, sorta, like maybe, a bit forgot to plumb the wall. On a scale of 1 to 10 this is an eleven, because I just followed the line of the original wall when I rebuilt the green wall. The original wall, being 100 years old was not even related to 'plumb', even distantly. Nel's task was to tile the wall, but in omitting to plumb it, I unleashed a Gordian Knot into her world of straightness. Racked, uneven, unsquare, unplumb, bent, distorted, unlevel, twisted and out-of-true - it was all of these, and more. It was, as the physicists say, not even wrong, and it has taken me a day to fix. However, when completed(and tiling is due to start tomorrow), the new shower will look great and will be a brilliant morale boost.

The final images show the current state of our back garden. We have demolished so much of the interior of the house that the back garden is now full. A priority is to get someone (else) to move it. Having moved this much brick, plaster and wood once, I have no desire to do it again. As a side note, this is the third time the garden has looked like this, although the first time was with the effects of the tenants. Bear in mind that the height of each pile of junk is about five feet and it forms a kind of Himalayan mountain chain along the length of the garden.