Anyone for tennis?

Our nice new lawn

Its been a quiet week for building as we wait for Darren to return from holiday and fit radiators and pipework before the floor can be laid. However, Gary and his chums made short work of laying our lovely new lawn, although it was a bit touch and go with the weather closing in. But a long day on Monday saw most of the lawn laid, and the job was completed on Tuesday morning. True to form, and as predicted by the weather forecasters (I guess they have to get it right sometimes), the rain started Tuesday lunchtime and turned to snow by the evening. Had it rained earlier, all Gary's hard work would have been wasted as he needed to lay the turf on dry sub soil (a sandy loam which he brought with him as our clay was a soggy mess). Its surprising how small the garden appears in the photo, but how large it seems in reality. Given that the border you can see to the right of the photo is 104 foot long, and the distance from the house to the right hand boundary is 35 feet, then it isn't really small, it just looks as though it is.

Now that the plaster has well and truly dried out Roy suggested that a coat of emulsion could be applied to seal the walls. I started this today (hall) and will continue tomorrow with the lounge ceiling, which represents something of a challenge as the highest point is nearly 16 feet above the floor. Still, armed with a roller on a pole I should be able to reach most of it. Or perhaps I could get a trampoline?

Jan and I have had some success with tiles having just returned from our local tile supplier who had a completely different range of tiles to anything we've seen elsewhere. We're close to agreement on wall tiles for the shower room and en-suite, but have stumbled a bit on floor tiles for the wet room (shower room). The ones we like only come in ginormous size, whereas the slope to the drain in the wet room demands smaller tiles to make it easier to lay. We're hoping that the very friendly assistant at the tile suppliers can find something similar that comes in both large and small sizes.

Hopefully Roy and his boys will get busy with the remaining jobs this coming week although it looks like more snow is forecast. Assuming that the forecasters have got it wrong again, we should have the pamments laid to form the porch floor, the kerb edging done (to the line of the pegs in the photo), and all the bricks, fencing, and general builders detritus collected by Roy.

I've been checking out modular stair kits in the odd spare moment and found a local supplier tucked away behind Tesco in Baldock. Having arranged to meet the proprietor yesterday afternoon, I was surprised when he wasn't there. However, an exceedingly helpful guy stopped milling a lump of wood and took me to the sawdust covered "showroom" which consisted of a couple of steps from three different manufacturers ranges. None were secure so trying to walk up them was impossible. When I asked if they had an example of a specific model - the Ehleva Vector 83, he showed me another model from another manufacturer, and then tried to tell me it was the one I had asked to see. By now, somewhat unconvinced by this guy's knowledge, I asked if he had any literature on the Ehleva Vector 83. He confirmed he had, disappeared and came back with an Arke brochure, who whilst an Italian manufacturer, is an entirely different company. After a rather futile little interlude of "that's not what I asked for" and "yes its what you want", I left.

Just off now to try drawing up designs for a contrasting tile pattern for the shower room and en-suite. Mind you, we might just Google images of "bathrooms" and pinch someone else's ideas!

Jan & Rog