Bathroom refit: Day 4

A day of delays today. The electrician who didn't turn up yesterday was late again. Turns out he's the other son of the father-and-son duo who've been working here all week. Nice to keep it in the family. Only he was tied up with another job and didn't arrive until about 2pm. This appeared to slow the other guys down. I guess there were things needed doing that could only be done after the sparky had finished.

So progress was slow. Dad concentrated on completing the wall boarding, which included the outside wall. I didn't realise this would involve removing the old soil pipe but when you think about it, it's the most obvious thing to do. It means (a) we get a nice clean new plastic pipe instead of the grotty old cast iron one, and (b) the plasterer has a flat surface to work to, which means the finished job will be much better. They'll cut a hole through the new plaster when it comes time to fit the pan.

Mid-morning I noticed a plume of steam issuing from the boiler vent again. I had once more forgotten to turn the central heating off. Our new boiler effectively doesn't have an "off" position. It has four "zones" corresponding to the previous concept of two on and two off timers. Only what were the "off" zones are now just periods where the required temperature is set lower than during the "on" zones. In our case the daytime off zone is set to 12°C and the nighttime to 7°C. Since these guys regularly leave the front door open, the temperature in the hall drops below 12 (it's been down at 8 twice this week!) and the boiler fires up. So for a great many hours this week we've been paying to heat the street.

Here's the wall boarding at the other end of the room. This is the window under which the bath will go. At the left of the picture you can just see the first-fix plumbing for the wash hand basin, which is what Son was doing while Dad was boarding.

We had a visit from the plasterer this afternoon too, to size the job up. With the delays caused by the absent sparky the job won't be ready for plastering until the end of tomorrow, so the poor plasterer has to come on Sunday. Now I'm worried the plaster won't have dried out properly by the time they come to tile. Further photos and the rest of the week's progress in my Flickr 'bathroom refurbishment' set.