15th October 2017

Yesterday the power was reconnected to the house, when I say reconnected the official term is terminated inside the house. This is the first stage of a 3 stage process, the next step is to get a utility company to connect a meter and then an electrician to connect a consumer unit. During the last week Paul has been up at the house and has done a tremendous job with the front and rear gardens. The front has had the hedge cut back and the grass strimmed and all of the rubbish that we bagged up last weekend removed. He has also strimmed the back garden down and trimmed all of the hedges. The transformation is remarkable. Hopefully with it being this time of year it won’t need too much attention before the spring next year. Tomorrow he is going up to remove the first of two massive trees - hopefully I will be able to pop up and see how they get on however I am working in London on Monday so need to leave tomorrow evening and I have a few jobs to do at home. Spok is talking about getting a fire going to burn a lot of the rubbish - well at least he can’t burn the house down !! (Can he??)

Sharon has been pressing on with trying to clean the walls in the current main bedroom. It’s extremely tedious work but it is looking loads better. We’ve talked about should we just take the plaster off but if this works we’d be silly to as they seem in very good condition.

I have been in demolition mode this weekend. I have removed the ceiling on the landing and bagged up all the lats for sticks and bagged up all the rubble (with the help of my trusty wife). I then moved on to the kitchen and knocked out the dividing wall between the kitchen and bathroom and the pantry and then the wall between the the bathroom and pantry which has well and truly opened the kitchen up. The plan is to put a bathroom upstairs eventually. Finally I chiselled all the smoke damaged plaster off the walls in the kitchen and the former pantry and bathroom. Again with the help of Sharon all bagged up and put out. We had an SOS call to Sharon’s mum for her to fetch us extra rubble sacks which she did straight away. This enabled us to leave the house all nice and tidy ready for next weekend when we plan to get the kitchen ceiling down.Read more