The Easter weekend saw the welcome return of the house martins here at Joiners Cottage, making what could have been a long and frustrating 4 days into a pleasure, as we were able to spend the time watching their aerial acrobatics, in and out of the open sheds like miniature fighter pilots in a dogfight.

Meanwhile, week 6 of the building work can best be described as ‘frustrating’. Don’t get me wrong, lots of work got done, particularly upstairs, all in preparation for the plumber and plasterers who are imminent.

Downstairs there was lots of clearing up, also in readiness for the plumber and plasterers. This is what clearing up looks like, so you can imagine what it looked like before.

clearing up

clearing up 2

Now I’m no ‘Mrs Mop’, I’d much rather work for 2 hours in the garden than 1 hour in the house any day, but even I’m desperate to get my ‘marigolds’ on and clean something.

Sadly, there’s no point as I’m sure the plasterers and plumber will make more mess, plus the fact we have no hot water until the boilers installed and National Grid turn up to join the 2 holes together and give us a gas supply!

They had not turned up by Thursday teatime and we were getting really worried, then on Friday morning at 09.45am we got a call saying they would be on site in an hour.

We got there in plenty of time, but by 11.30am they were still absent, despite 2 false alarms. One of their vans sped passed at 11am but didn’t stop, then about 20 minutes later another one came by, but when we flagged him down it turned out he only did ‘electric’.

They finally turned up at 11.45am by which time our nerves were pretty frayed. The job took them just short of 2 hours and looked pretty hard work. Now we only have to wait for them to fill the holes in (again) and then find a supplier to fit a meter ( I don’t think it will be NPower).

Just for added frisson, we have handed in our notice at the cottage, just 40 days and 40 nights to go then. The pressure is really on now.