… the return of Sparky.

Plaster drying nicely, our serenading electrician returned for his round #2. Our newly embedded cabling and pattress boxes got dressed in sockets and switches.

This man is so precise; he first went around the area armed with a Stanley knife trimming away any small amounts of plaster that had overflowed the edges of his neat handwork. Then sang his accompaniment to the radio as he fitted all the hardware.

Francine has bought a design statement for a light over the dining table. She didn’t want him to fit that until the cabinet work had been done just in case it got clonked, so he rigged up a temporary ceiling rose for the interim.

Time for Sparky to test his map of the eight downlighter positions, now covered by new ceiling, in the kitchen area. Out came his hole saw revealing wires in all the right places as hoped. In went the downlighters. Well, mostly in – he asked if I’d like him to leave them protruding, rather than flush as yet, so I could paint the ceiling without worrying about getting paint on them. Of course.

I am going to have to release his switches and sockets, of course, and I just hope I can screw them back as precisely as he did. You-know-who will be checking.

We’ve taken the opportunity also to have a power socket placed over the patio outside. This is just a regular double socket (Sparky doesn’t use singles at all) in a waterproof housing. That should make Francine’s job of mowing the grass easier – no more need to run the extension lead out through the back door. Woman’s work, gardening.

I may have been doing it for 40+ years but I’ve also learnt a bit about decorating. I’ve not had to deal with very much raw plaster before; I’m supposed to apply a so-called mist coat – regular emulsion thinned down so it soaks into the plaster better. The smallest quantity of cheap trade white emulsion our local professional paint supplier sells is a 10-litre tub. I’ve got plenty, then, but it was only £20.

The plaster is nearly dry enough.

No huge visible change yesterday (day #11 , incidentally): the main work was a final skimming of plaster so its ready for painting – or it will be when the plaster has dried out properly.

The main trenches in the floor, for radiator pipework and power to the island unit, have also been filled. The floor will need levelling off with screed to make a seamless single floor between what were two separate rooms, presumably before the units are fitted.

We did have another glitch. Francine noticed that the new central heating controller was off again, yet we still had power to all circuits. I had pulled a fuse to fit a USB charging socket in our bedroom so I wondered if refitting the fuse had caused the problem; damn sensitive it it had been that and I‘d done similar things plenty of times before with no problem on its forerunner.

I left a message for Plumbers Mate, who’d be hanging radiators on the morrow, to let him know. He soon arrived with a smirk on his face. As they had drained the heating system down again after their pipework test, he’d taken power away from the system “so you couldn’t accidentally turn the heating on”.

Egg on face – better than a real glitch.

Today was more interesting in that Plumbers Mate returned to fit our sexy new radiators, the ones you can see through so the walls need painting behind them [That was just for Steve.] We’ve got three of them, one in the hall, one in the kitchen and a slightly narrower one in the dining area. These look so much better than our old conventional  radiators that I can see us wanting one in the lounge to match.

This morning was quite busy once more with our jolly Plumbers Mates in to test their new underfloor pipework. A damn good idea before burying it in flooring compound, I thought. That meant them filing the system and then firing up the boiler. [Our hot water has been via an immersion heater for the duration.]

Glitch: the central heating system didn’t fire up. Much head-scratching. The thermostat was live and the boiler electronics were live but there was no glimmer of life from the main central heating controller. All electrical circuits are connected so we had a puzzle. One Plumbers Mate popped out to collect a replacement controller, which is fortunately still current. That fixed it. It seems that all our blipping on and off of power in the earlier days of the project had somehow fried or otherwise buggered the original controller.

Happily the new soon-to-be-underfloor pipework proved sound and all was now well. I popped out to get yet another matchpot of paint.

Builder Men were, of course, here as well. Their task today was more plastering; having done the ceilings before the weekend they now attacked the walls. They are plastering down just far enough to disappear behind cabinets, where there are some. I am looking forward to having nice, smooth virgin walls to paint. Given a choice I’d never use paper again. The trouble is, once an emulsioned wall has been papered, you pretty much have to paper it from then on ‘cos some paint sticks to the wall and some comes off with the paper creating a ridged patchwork.

This chap makes plastering look easy. I still say it isn’t.

We will be having three large vertical radiators fitted: one in the dining area, one in the kitchen area and the third in the hallway, where it will replace two smaller conventional radiators. The two larger ones weigh 40kg so I really don’t want to get involved in hefting them off the wall to paint behind them; I would much prefer to get the walls painted before they get fitted.

I’m also keen to get the other walls painted before our new cupboards are fitted because I’m anxious to avoid having to cut-in around brand new cabinets. So, we’ve been zooming about like BAFs looking at colour cards and buying matchpots to decide on a colour for the walls.

We’d seen a Farrow & Ball colour that appeared to match our Ivory-coloured cabinets. Good ol’ Homebase [I’m lying] didn’t have a matchpot, though. Neither did a larger Homebase in MK. Mind you, at £5 for a matchpot and with a 2.5L tin of Farrow & Ball emulsion costing a stonking £48, I don’t think I’m unhappy about missing out.

Dulux matchpots are a much more reasonable £1.60 and come with a handy-dandy built in mini roller to apply them. We bought 5, I cut 5 pieces of lining paper and started to apply them.

They were all essentially light cream and all looked essentially the same, to me, anyway; differences were subtle to say the least. I wondered if the lining paper, being beige, might be affecting the resultant appearance so I applied more samples to plain white A4 paper. No, they all looked essentially the same. Subtle differences may just about have been discernible as they dried.

Our friendly kitchen supplier said we could have the sample cabinet door, with a chunk of the quartz worktop and our contrasting Oxford Blue island units to stare at and compare. Very helpful.

Stop Press: None of ‘em are right.

Back to the drawing board.

I frequently refer to plastering as what I consider to be the most skilful job in the building trade [and I just learnt that all my life I’ve been misspelling skilful with a double “L” – live and learn]. So, as well as being surprised that it’s “skilful”, I was surprised when our Builder Man declared plastering to be easy. Right.

Well, he clearly found it easy and set about proving it to me today by plastering our two new ceilings. He’s also done the plaster coat over the roughcast where the kitchen door used to be.

Most interesting was his special equipment for the task. His special equipment may be necessary to enable quite rapid movement around the room while covering the ceiling, where moving a modest step ladder about might prove too restrictive. He wandered freely about the space walking on what can only be described as stilts. They may have a technical name but I don’t know it. [No, just looked on Amazon and they are, indeed, stilts.]

Our building site has been a bit crowded today.

With all the services in the ceiling space now fitted and/or fixed, our Builder Men have been fixing the plasterboard for the new ceiling (which will NOT have bloody Artex on it). The full sheets went up quite quickly but cutting and fitting the smaller fiddly bits, like those covering our steel beam, took a while. It’s beginning to look like a room again, though. I wasn’t expecting plasterboard over the stub walls – maybe that’s because it ties in with the beam, or maybe it’s because roughcast would take a while to dry before it could be plastered.

Meanwhile, down at floor level, our plumbers were chopping out bits of floor to expose existing pipework and run new pipework for our new radiators. ‘T was both a dusty and very noisy business, chiselling out concrete. Francine and I tried to move the smaller of the two sizes of radiator and it was bloody heavy. That’ll test the brickwork.

Builder Men had wanted to fix our new ceiling this morning. However, while the ceiling was down making all services readily accessible, I was keen to have our Plumber Men renew a few bath tub water supply joints. I had refitted the bathroom over 20 years ago and, out of necessity [lack of skill], had used a few push-fit connectors. Those connectors have a 20-year guarantee. They may have been fine but we don’t want them to let go and leak inside our nice new ceiling now, do we? So, proper compression joints it is, then. Our friendly Plumber Men helpfully shifted appointments so they could come and do it.

Our plumbers also delivered three fancy new radiators, worked out where they’d be fixed and began chasing channels in the floor to take the new supply pipes. ‘T was a noisy business.

Sparky was here for his day #3 at the same time. I’m not sure if he was still singing but if he was, we wouldn’t have heard him over the power tool chiselling up our kitchen floor.

His first focus was putting in two double sockets for our router, NAS, lamp and phone, whilst also moving the BT socket back to where it enters the house. With the kitchen door removed, that space was now usable for the first time since the house was built.

Internet back up and working, he shifted his attention to the garage where the state of power was unclear, to me, at least. He spent the afternoon fitting a swanky distribution board with two circuits, one for the lights and one for mains power. He also spotted that our powered garage door was running just on an extension lead. He wired that into the circuit properly, too. Much better. I like this guy.

Both Plumber Men and Sparky left for the day. At 16:00 we thought that was it. Then Builder Man #2 pitched up and started preparing some fancy hoist to help with fixing our plasterboard ceilings. ‘T was too late in the day to make a start but they should be ready for the off tomorrow.

New week, new tradesman.

Our electrician arrived at 08:45 on Monday to begin sorting out lights and power sockets. He’s a chirpy chappy. First he very sensibly revisited our requirements; the hiatus caused by lockdown dulls the memory, after all. As the boss, Francine, confirmed placements of power points and switches, he scribbled their positions on the walls in pencil.

Most workmen work to a radio and he was no exception. On it went, Radio 2, and he began singing away quite happily. Francine chuckled.

Electricians love it when the ceilings are down because they have unfettered access to remove the old cabling and rerun the new stuff. He soon had the old untidy stuff out and began running his supplies, and much more neatly than the original builders had, I might add.

He is a precise chappy too, which really impressed me. He was using a laser level to line things up between walls and I spotted him using a spirit level on every pattress box as he fixed it into the wall. He’s like me in that he likes accuracy and symmetry, spacing power points symmetrically above a future worktop.

We had a few planned power outages but no spasmodic unscheduled breaks so maybe that gremlin has been laid to rest. He will be changing us over to a new circuit breaker system instead of our archaic wire fuse box. We need a few extra circuits – there are 6 at at the moment – for two ovens and induction hob.

Francine is kicking me out of my office of many years standing and taking it over. The third bedroom is to become my office. My current situation is less than ideal because my new desktop has crappy wireless. My trusty old Dell desktop of 8 years had wonderful wireless fine but this one, 8 years younger, doesn’t “see” the router. So, I’ve been forced into using a powerline adapter between different power circuits which drops out occasionally, sometimes frequently. The new router position and my new office meant that sparky offered to run a Cat6 ethernet cable under the floor boards (while the ceiling was down) so I’m hoping things will get better.

A new photograph seemed a bit pointless because there really isn’t much to look at, we’ve simply swapped one dangling set of old cables for a partially dangling set of new cables.

Francine is still chuckling.

We’re having the weekend to ourselves in the building site.

Before our Men arrived last Monday to begin demolition, we needed to get our fridge to safety; somewhere it could still be used. Francine and I emptied it and managed to walk it the length of the house and over the door still into the conservatory. If/when the sun hits the conservatory the temperature climbs and the poor fridge sounds as if it’s struggling a little but it works.

The wall we were going to lose was the wall with our range cooker backing onto it, pretty much in the centre. The wall contained both the electricity supply [the oven is electric] and the gas supply pipe [the hob is gas] so the oven was the first major piece of kit that was lost irredeemably.

In planning for the project, we bought a single portable induction hotplate to supplement our collection of barbecues, to be used if the weather was suitable, and our bottled gas Cadac Carri Chef Grill, rehomed from Spain. Both the hotplate and the Cadac also fit the conservatory and could be used there if the weather proved inclement.

After Men had left on Friday, the weather was set fair and we declared the weekend to be here. I carried the Carri Chef out onto the patio and started on one of my favourite meals, a paella. [Just don’t call it a Paella Valencia ‘cos I love putting chorizo in it.]

After our initial shock and feeling unsettled by the sudden change on Monday, this was beginning to feel comfortable. My vegetable content was artichoke hearts – bottled rather than the beautiful fresh, small ones available in Spain – but we also had a handful of courgette flowers which I added near the end.

There was even room on the lower part of the patio, away from the construction zone, for our garden dining table. The not Paella Valenciana was very good, though I don’t think either of us noticed the courgette flowers.

After a bit of a hiatus for some of the weekend, since the sun has now returned, we’re finishing off the weekend with a hickory-smoked chicken on the charcoal Weber.

Subtitled: Return of the Gremlins.

Yesterday and the half of the preceding day had gone very smoothly. After Main Man had removed our cooker circuit fuse both we and they enjoyed uninterrupted service.

This morning Francine was up at her usual early hour making tea. She had just done so and brought it upstairs announcing that our power had once again gone on furlough. “Bother”, said Franco, crossly. What in tarnation was going on?

On Sunday I had fitted a new LED almost-flush ceiling light in our utility room. The cabling had been a bit of a squeeze so I feared that might be the culprit. I pulled the utility room fuse. Power settled down. I removed the light and checked all the cabling. I replaced the fuse.

Some little time later, blip – off went the power again. “Bother”, repeated Franco, crossly, and pulled the fuse to the 30 amp ring main on the kitchen side of the house. Power was restored but only briefly. I now had three out of six fuses out and still no stable supply.

Men arrived and I related the sad tale. I turned off the whole of the fuse box and Main Man went round the kitchen, where all the former lights and power points were hanging on their cables, checking for loose connections. He reckoned he’d found two dubious earth connections and corrected them.

Power back on. Thus far it has remained back on. Mind you, last time it lasted for about 36 hours. Fingers firmly crossed.

The main business of the day could now commence, the main business being a 3-metre steal beam which was carried in and somehow hoisted into place above the two reconstructed stub walls. What it is to have strength. It is sitting on engineering bricks with more compression strength, together with some special rigid material to shim it up to the precise height needed.

“Props away”, boys.

We also have a nice new window board as the sill to our new dining area window and Francine is spending yet more money ordering a new kitchen window to match the profile of the one in the dining area. Women!

So, end of round #1; Men have cleared up and we await the electrician for round #2. Meanwhile we have a weekend to relax in our building site.