We passed our plumbing inspection for the boiler. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha hahahaha. (Manic laughter continues for some time).
Annoyingly, after I pressure tested it the first time it leaked when filled with water. Not sure how, the water is meant to be less leaky than the air, but it did.
Also, it turns out that 1 1/4″ pipe is right at the limits of what my little torch will manage to heat. It took about 25 minutes to get the pipe hot enough for solder to flow (not helped by the fact that the lower pipe was full of water and acting as a giant heatsink). It looks like someone dumped about 40 tons of solder onto it, but it held pressure for a couple of days, so I think it should be fine.
I’ve not actually filled it with water because I’m waiting for the antifreeze to arrive. Then I’ll flush the system properly and can run through the boiler priming with water routine. All quite exciting.
Also, in rapid developments, the came, they dug, they poured concrete in the hole.
Come November, we’ll have a garage. Hopefully just after we move in. I mean, ideally, before would be great. But that’s not happening, so afterwards it is. I’m just checking in on when we can paint the garage floor because Rebecca has already cheerfully marked up the driveway. But it seems like I could do that before they come put the garage on it’s foundation. Feh.
And… we have a sink.
It’s not connected to anything, and doesn’t have faffy little things like drains, or pipework to the taps. But we have one. And it’s hung on the wall.
But the biggest change in the bathroom (drumroll, please) is…
(long suspenseful pause)
We have a floor!
Hoo-fuckin’-rah!
So that’s now ready for tiling (or will be tomorrow). We have to wash our tiles (they’re second hand and have clearly been stored outside). But… the self levelling compound seems to have gone down without trauma. There’s one spot where it’s a bit thin, so I’ll prime it when I prime the next section of floor that I’m doing and throw a bit extra on it; it’s literally a few teaspoons short, weirdly).
I’ve sealed around much of the rest of the house, so we should be good to pour the rest of the floor. The original plan was to do it in one go, but the choice I made to switch to a different self-levelling compound (which only needs to ‘encapsulate the mesh’, it doesn’t need 1/8″ minimum on top of the mesh, meant changing the primer. Changing the primer to the matching one for this compound, it turns out, means that the floor has to be both primed and covered in mesh in a three hour period. If you leave it more than three hours, you have to re-prime. Which is difficult if you’ve got mesh on the ground.
I assume this is just dandy if you’ve got a big team of people. But we’ve got a team of us. So that ain’t happening.
Anyhow, more floor covering, that’s the plan for today. Yay.
