Rock on you crazy plumber

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Yesterday I arrived to find a confused looking driver sat in a big truck with rock in it. He was peering at our house, cars were working their way around the lorry, and when I pulled up he looked expectantly at me.

Eventually it transpired that he was meant to be delivering it today, but since he was there yesterday morning he managed to contact our garage groundworks person, and they agreed to let him drop off the enormous pile of rock. Although it turns out our groundworks guy is less than thrilled, because the city are mandating landscape fabric under the rock. So they’re going to have to move the rock onto the fabric.

Still, we wanted rock for around the house, and we now seem to have quite a lot of it.

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Our groundworks guy then contacted me in somewhat of a rapid manner, because we’d not actually agreed the price for the work with the construction entrance, but since we’ve ordered the garage (and it’s going to be delivered and assembled in 5 weeks time, come hell or high water), there were distinct limitations on what we could do about pricing anyway.

So, yay. The garage is finally moving towards being an actual building. That’s good.

We also worked all weekend on the plumbing. To say I vastly underestimated the timeline for the plumbing would be fair. I think time-wise on the floor it went much better than expected, but the actual plumbing in for the boiler’s taken waaay longer.

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Still, it was finished enough yesterday that I could pressurize it with air, and it doesn’t appear to be leaking (except that the pressure-cut off is so close to the maximum pressure I can achieve with the little yellow pump, and the time it takes me to remove the tyre-valve from the adaptor to is long enough that the pressure drops to zero in the process, so all I can do is leave it on – and it slowly leaks the air out. But I’m fairly certain that it’s leaking through the pump, not anywhere else.

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It took two trips today, but I got the bits required to connect one side of the central heating circuit; I actually have nearly all the bits to do the other side, but was short two 90s and a chunk of copper pipe. I’m starting to have to do battle a little more with the fact that the pipework has large sections that were pre-assembled, and our space really doesn’t fit them that well. It’s a pretty tight space (as you can see in the fetching photo which sadly predates the ridiculous U the plumbing does to get around from the outlet to the outlet manifold.).

I’m sure that the professional plumber who comes to connect the boiler will weep, or laugh, or both. But it’s together and not leaking (afaik). I’ll take it.

Hopefully I can get the heating and hot water side finished tomorrow. I made a list… maybe this time I’ll manage to get all the bits. Once that’s done we can fill it (although I didn’t get antifreeze yet, because I’ve not calculated the volume of antifreeze required). The system wants flushing first, anyhow…

My other time filling activity has been tiling. I need to find our tile-hole-cutter because I’m really not willing to pay the prices I’ve seen for tile hole cutters over here (especially since our £10 pack of 3 sizes will do fine for this job… if I can find it).

The tile saw I picked up from second use is very nice (but the guard retaining screws are missing, so I can only really use it outside because it flings water a great distance). It’s way nicer than the crappy moulded plastic one we had before. I’ve also got a scorey-snapper tile cutter, and that seems to be working way better than last time I tried one.

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So far things seem to be going on okay on the tiling front. It certainly looks the way we wanted it to… and is progressing reasonably quickly. If I can find the tile hole saw then give it a few more days of work and we should be done…

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.