A day for DIY

I could have called this post "string theory," as I spent much of the morning working out how to string together the new sockets in the (new) lounge. [Aside: I confuse myself with the name of this room in its interim state. I guess it's still "the dining room" at the moment, since it hasn't changed function yet, and we're still lounging in the old lounge, but it's also occasionally referred to as the new lounge, which is also correct in its own way, since we can't use it as a dining room while it's in the process of being refurbished]

After an inspiring suggestion from Annie I realised it would be quite simple to incorporate them into the ground floor ring rather than spur them off from existing sockets, but this suggestion came too late to avoid me laying two lots of cables across the room (using the sub-floor space as described earlier) where only one would have been needed had I thought of it earlier. Still it's a much better solution all round, so the next time I'm in there I'll be pulling one of those cables back and connecting it between the two new sockets.

I also made a start on my third attempt to erect Nikki's curtain pole. There has been an abortive second attempt using a fixing that proved useless. Its uselessness was not apparent until after I'd tightened it up in the hole though, whereupon extracting it necessitated the removal of a large section of wall along with it. Many expletives were expleted. Explicitly. Today I began the process of filling the hole back up again prior to attempting to refix the brackets with more suitable fixings.

I love old houses, but I do NOT love the walls that come with them, with their crumbling plaster of unknown depth, and extremely hard bricks that cause drill bits to draw childish patterns in the plaster as they skate across their surface.