And with that, the pool was gone.

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So, a while back I shared that we’d had a sudden and unexpected installation of an above ground pool. One day we didn’t have one, the next day you could swim in our front garden.

It wasn’t an ideal situation, although the River Birch (or Beech, and possibly not river anything, it’s all rather unclear) does seem to have enjoyed the underground garden-watering-system that was active while we were on holiday. It is looking very green.

Anyhow, we paid a lot of money to plumbers this week. The old, failed water main is still in the ground, but the posh burrowing machine they brought around did manage to get a nice new main under the house. Impressively, you could see a constant flow out of the old main – which had been switched off for days – as water slowly flowed backwards out of the house and into the ground.

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The only slight fly in the ointment was that they didn’t bring a flagger with them – so had no means of doing traffic control – which meant that they couldn’t put pipe in the ground as far towards the front of our yard as they’re meant to. Because the digging machine couldn’t go any further back than in the picture otherwise it’d block the road. Which meant that our plumbers got to dig a massive trench for the last 8′ or so. I felt a bit sorry for them, particularly when one of them asked if we had any water bottles…

… which I’d not bothered to bring many of, because I was expecting the water to be back on. Ah well.

I also had a chat with one of them about the heating system – he warned me off the boiler I was looking to get because there are no local dealers. Parts, apparently, take quite a while for them to get if something does go wrong. There is, however, a combi-boiler brand that’s fairly common around here and is stocked by a bunch of places (along with a range of spares). So I’ll be throwing one of them on the wall I guess.

He also suggested something I’d heard of (which is horrendous, but clever) which would mean we would only need a hot-water-boiler, not a full combi, but because we have the heated towel rails which really need a corrosion inhibitor in the water, the cunning ‘use the hot water recirculation circuit for heating’ idea won’t work.

Feh. It is the difference between $1500 and $2400.

I continue to regret choosing to put a gas heating system in. Although the money for putting in gas really would have been a bit crazy for just a cooker. Although, that’s really the deal-breaker. I still can’t stand cooking on any electric stove I’ve encountered, but electric heating and hot water would have been fine had I have thought about it a lot more than I did. Well, I did think about it a lot, but… I wasn’t flexible enough in my thinking.

Still, since we like cooking on gas, we would like to experiment with producing our own gas using a biodigester, but probably not in this house.

So while they were boring a neat hole under our house, I spent the time chopping plywood into chunks and gluing / screwing it to the floor.

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The pipe-guides are all done in about 1/5th the house. Some of that, though, is the complex sections – the laundry’s done, for example, as is some of the fiddly bit where these pipe guides cross the hydronic pipework for the heated towel rails (and where I had to be super careful about putting screws). Hopefully the majority of the house should go roughly as quickly as the bedroom did (which was pretty fast once I’d worked out the system).

I was hoping to get the pantry done today, but instead decided to wake up at 3am and spend the rest of the night waiting for sleep to return. As I was already fairly tired the idea of going and working with powertools didn’t seem too clever, so instead I’ve done errands and worked on a long, tedious, but important government form that I’m working my way through completing. Yay.

We have, however, got pricing on our range cooker, fridge, and range hood. We’ve also ordered a biiiiiillion proper light fixtures (as opposed to the temporary ones up in the hall), and we’ve installed… three.

Oh, oh! But I do have to share that our glowy around the door LED ridiculousness…. works!

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Yeah, I know, it’s OTT. That’s us.

A couple of the stupid sticky “holds 1lb per inch” bits of tape have, as expected, failed. But I can fix that and I have a plan for when the others fail.

Anyway, it’s pleasingly glowy. Albeit over the top.

And we are starting to tentatively talk about moving in… in a couple of months which is quite exciting. After 2 years of struggle, getting into the house would be bloody awesome.

KateWE

Kate's allegedly a human (although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise). She's definitely not a vampire, despite what some other people claim. She's also mostly built out of spite and overcoming oppositional-sexism, racism, and other random bullshit. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, she's here to reassure that it's all fine.