Halfway hearth
Staying at my folks last night, ended up working till all hours trying to do a couple of jobs I’d been promising to do for ages. Everything went wrong, lost passwords, pins, me being stupid, my laptop conking out when I picked it up (loose battery), just about everything. Still sore and very tired I think I got to bed around 1:40, not good when I’d promised myself an early night, still I did manage to get some things sorted out.
Work day today but I managed to fit in a couple of texts to the fire fitters to check things were going to plan, also a couple to the tree surgeon to get a quote on the final trees and to make a berk of myself suggesting he use copper nails to kill the remaining tree trunks. I’m sure he’d said that’s how he did it, but on reflection it might have been a local ex’ farmer who suggested it. Andrew thought it was hilarious I thought I felt a bit dim.
Also paid £128 via credit card for the granite directly to the hearth supplier and the full cutting, finishing, polishing and chamfering is all ready to go. Gav just now has to collect it and fit it.
Visited my folks again after work who were busy looking after my daughter for the day, she was really on good form and full of beans. She wasn’t too happy to find I was going to my gaff for the evening though, I explained as best I could that I would be seeing the builders and I needed to go. Her logic was to offer to help, she could help cleaning up the dust if I cleaned up the bricks. The minds of three year olds are pretty wonderful, I doubt a teenage strapping son might have been so generous.
Anyway got back to the house after two days away to find the drive lined with the concrete remnants of the fireplace. The back door was surrounded by umpteen bags of brick shards, some serious work had been going on.
Earlier that day Gav’ had texted to say that the mantel oak lump I’d bought last Friday looked great. He wasn’t wrong it looks excellent and he’d followed my main piccie to the inch. I was worried though that the initial design hinted at them having to build a false wall to extend the inglenook into the room to surround the fire as the existing chimney wasn’t deep enough. This would have meant that the exceptional coving in the room would have been lost behind the faked wall. I was surprised and uber-pleased to find that he’d sunk the inglenook deep into my very generous chimney breast and hadn’t needed to resort to the bogus wall and had used my existing fireplace chimney breast. This has meant that not only has the original gorgeous cornice been saved but the fire should not extend any further than it had done into the room.
Fitting my Vodafone Sure Signal box as I type, a simple little device that routes ones mobile signal down through the router and onto the internet, avoiding the normal cellular network transmitters. The signal here is appalling and texts can take twenty plus goes to send. This should make my phone work all of the time now employing my internet connection (though this is a bit tardy too it should take it). The version 3 has just been released but I don’t like it as the gubbins are all built into the plug, the v2 I bought on eBay is a separate box and looks much nicer and can be put up on a shelf. Normally they go to auction for £50+, this one I bought on a buy it now for £30, the chap I bought it from was amazed that it went within 10 minutes of posting up the item. I was amazed that he’d posted it up so cheap. It looks kosher anyway and he mentions that he’s deregistered it, which makes it usable, don’t buy ones that have not been deregistered, hopefully it’ll not turn out to be the sham that my eBac dehumidifier turned out to be.