New Gas Supply

So today I got the new gas supply. This has been ongoing for a while and I believe that National Grid put my application on hold by mistake at one point leading it to take 3 months to get the work done rather than the 3-4 weeks I was promised initially. The guys came and dug up the road and the garden and put the connection through to the outside wall where they installed a white meter box.

The only problem was that I had not thought about the fact that I would have to request a meter (and gas connection) from a supplier. I phoned e.on yesterday and unfortunately there is a 6 working day wait for this (at least it is not weeks or months!) so the gas won't get connected until next Friday, and hence no hot water or heating for another week. I have an electric fire in the living room and a fan heater in the bedroom so that is OK but will have to keep boiling the kettle numerous times to get a bath! Either that or go swimming a bit more often!

Having gas central heating and a new boiler will I think make the house more saleable in future as well as bringing it into the 21st century!

Kitchen and Bathroom Finished!

OK so the kitchen and bathroom fitters worked pretty damn hard to get both rooms as finished as possible at the end of last week as I was having people round for a barbeque on Saturday. They then came back yesterday to do the final touches and to put in more pipes for the central heating.

The bathroom is finished and just needs me to paint the woodwork around the door and the door itself. Here are the before and after pictures of the bathroom:

The kitchen now just needs the walls painting and some flooring added, which will be done after the rest of the heating pipes have gone in under the floor. It looks like I didn't take great 'before' pictures of the sink area but you can see the remains of the larder cupboard that was taken out together with all of the pipes to the tank in the loft (which was taken out). Also there was a false wall at the other end that needed removing and every wall needed replastering.

Dust, dust and more dust!

So today work started on the kitchen (at the same time as the bathroom!). ALl of the units have come out apart from the sink and the channeling has been done for the electrics. Unfortunately this has created a ton of dust which i only realised after getting in after being out for a few hours. So, nothing much was covered and the whole of the lounge is covered in a massive layer of dust :-( So, dust sheets now on for the rest of the mess and I'll just have to wait until it is done before I can clean it all up.

So the kitchen is stripped and looking like this:

The Bath is In

OK so a bit more progress on the bathroom, the bath is in along with most of the pipework so it is mostly a case of getting the basin in and changing over the toilet to the new one then tiling the whole room.

Work Started on the Bathroom

So the bathroom fitter started work today and started knocking off all the old tiles, removing the sink and redoing a lot of the pipework. He had to hold off on changing the toilet or else I would have been a bit stuck but tomorrow the bath should get in with a temporary shower as the boiler is not getting connected until the gas comes on 28th September.

Lots of work in the garden today

So yesterday I managed to put on the complete top coat on the front of the house so that it is now white (must get a picture update for that). I still need to do some bits round the door which are going to be a bit of work but I need to do that in shade so with a sunny day like today I decided to work on the back garden. There was one big raised border that was full of grass, brambles and weeds and I managed to get rid of those. Plus I got rid of the snail sanctuary that had been created by some paving slabs, so it is all looking a bit  tidier. There is still lots to do in the garden but this was good progress and very hard work for about 5 hours! These pictures are not great but you can kind of see how I have removed all the weeds from the back area!

First Coat Finished

So the first coat of the outside is done, just about had enough paint! It was quite tiring to do because of the textured bricks so the next coat may have to wait until next week as I have lots going on. Hopefully the weather will be OK to do that!

Excited that the bathroom is being installed next week together with the central heating system although the gas will not be installed until 28th September.

Great Weather for Painting the House

So today it was 25 degrees and sunny so I thought it would be a good idea to start painting the outside of the house. The house is painted in a kind of maroon colour at the moment and it looks like that was done quite a while ago so it needs a bit of freshening up. I wanted to paint it white and have already bought some paint to do it so I started in the porch where I had already began by cleaning and filling it.

When I began painting I realised that I might need more paint than I had as the bricks had small zig-zag indentations in them that meant they would take a lot more paint. I also realised that because the house was maroon it might need more than one coat to cover it. Luckily there was a big tin of cream masonary paint left in the back lean to when I got the house. In fact it was a full 5 litre pot. Anyway, I thought that I could use that as a base coat for the white to cover the maroon.

So, I made a bit of progress today but as I had the car I also needed to take some stuff to the dump so I didn't get to spend all day on it. This is as far as I got...