Today's ROSPA special

The melted chocolate extension plug behind the microwave - that's where my chocolate went. I wore my rubber-soled wellies to clean this one up...

Fibres

This little flashing box is our new fibre-optic internet connection (+multicast TV) - nominally up to 100Mb/s download AND upload. Actually, I get about 65 Mb/s directly connected and about 45 Mb/s on the wireless N. The high upload rate is very handy.

It's really waiting for our electrician to finish wiring up, first the electricity, then the gigabit ethernet that's going into every room. Then I'll have an enormous switch plugged into this to distribute it all over the house. The wireless will have to do for now...

Flower bed

Catching up now on all the things we did over the summer - this was one of the first - bringing the old flower bed back to life. We killed all the existing stuff and have now put in a geotextile underlay with lots of bark chips on top. It's got automatic watering laid in there too, so it hasn't been too much work to maintain over the summer. Weeds are amazing things though, and they still manage to poke through the slightest gap in the bark chips...

Water water everywhere

The obsession with pipes continues - this is but a small part of the garden watering system we've been putting into the garden.

It's spent the summer watering the tomatoes and our new flower bed, but I have greater plans for it...

There's a couple of conduits built in the concrete wall supporting the balcony - they were previously used to get water to and from the old swimming pool. I plan to use them to get the house cave-drain through the wall and down to the bottom of the garden where there's a real drain (underground).

We'll also take a garden water pipe through the wall to get the water out into the rest of the garden and down to the bottom of the garden where we'd like to put the chickens.

Knock knock

We've now decided to do something about the quarter of the downstairs which was the old studio - it's going to be a new playroom for the kids.

It will have two doors - one from the existing kitchen and one from the hall. As you can see, the existing door into the hall is still there, though rather impressively bricked up with concrete construction blocks.

All this means a bit of reconfiguration in the hall - the existing toilet under the stairs will become a cupboard and what was the old bathroom of the studio will become a new larger downstairs toilet.

The partially demolished old bathroom, which was raised up onto high steps, with lots of walls.


















The new shiny toilet is getting there - the plumbing work and demolition of the old bathroom is done now. Next we (meaning the builders and plumbers, by the way) need to do the underfloor heating in here and in the playroom next door, and put up all the plasterboard walls and ceiling.

The pipe going overhead is for the new laundry room upstairs (next project)...