Our Life by the Stream: Sunday, 2 November

Without any kitchen-designing to stop us working, we managed to spend more time at the house today, and achieved a fair amount; I started off with more sapling/bramble chopping [in case you haven't worked it out yet, that's going to be a recurring theme for quite some time to come! I reckon there's probably up to four acres of scrub where the former occupant sold the wood, and then did nothing after the trees were felled - I'm trimming saplings that are up to ~15' tall (at a guess; they're well over twice my height), and all the undergrowth that accompanies neglected land].

David sawed up the remaining willow into more manageable logs, and dragged them away from the conifer so that Adam and Colin can work safely and easily.

I was doing quite well with my clearing, and David with the last section of "lawn" to be strimmed when rain stopped play.

It seemed set in for the day, so we had a tea break [the pumpkin choc chip cookies that were one of the by-products of Friday's Jack-o'-lanterns went down well, too], and then started dismantling the boiler. That was one heavy lump of iron. We ended up taking off everything that we could remove, and using the angle grinder to cut off anything else that seemed likely to come off easily. It was worth it; an hour of so of 'trimming', and we could actually move the thing fairly easily. The remaining pipework is now gone, too, and the kitchen looks larger and cleaner.

All we need to do now is remove the concrete plinth...

Oh, and get the floor fixed; sadly, a water leak (or several) have left us with a patch of rotten floorboards in the middle of the kitchen...

Another thing to add to the list!

Along with the ceiling in the downstairs bathroom/what-will-be the utility - another casualty of not dealing with water when you should. I must remind David to ask Paul about a plasterer; I'm sure Steve said that Paul knows a good one?

Having removed the boiler, and still having daylight left, we were looking around for things to do indoors [having ordered the wallpaper stripper attachment for the steam cleaner we forgot to bring the cleaner, we don't yet have a vacuum cleaner, and have run out of bin bags, so the mess will be a project for next weekend], so finished a few half-completed jobs: we removed the brackets from the old radiators, and finally got around to taking out the upstairs loo. Which meant I could strip the rest of the vinyl off the bathroom walls upstairs, and I took off the remaining black tile-effect hardboard from the downstairs bathroom.

It's all looking a lot more "naked", and I'm hopeful that next weekend we can start stripping off the wallpaper; the place will smell an awful lot better when damp paper has gone [I'm hoping that the hints of "rodent-y-ness" will also go when I've brandished a steam cleaner about a bit (lot)].

We actually left the house in daylight, as we'd run out of things to do indoors, and the rain meant that outside it was far to soggy to contemplate even thinking about doing anything; that felt really weird!