Very enterprising, even if it did give me a visual of a small boy climbing up a chimney.
He'd hunted for the hatch and concluded that it must have been under the stairs before the downstairs khazi was fitted, but after he left I discovered it at the far end of the kitchen. True to his word the fitter disappeared in a subterranean direction. This turned out quite serendipitous, as it meant he had to crawl past the point where the old boiler was installed. And where there's a boiler, there's gas. So he had a ready-made supply to tap into, and "all" he had to do was run the pipe along the rest of the kitchen, through the hall, and elbow into the new lounge. Simple. I wouldn't have done it though.
Meanwhile his lad was ripping out and making good, leaving a fireplace looking something like this:The bags of rubble are for back-filling, which ensures the heat from the fire doesn't disappear into next door. The whole job only took a couple of hours (ripping out alone would probably have taken me a whole weekend) but left the house with an unmistakable smell of old soil. Couldn't work out if this was coming from the underfloor area, stirred up by all the crawling about, or from all the fine soot that had been knocked out of the hearth.
This evening we were treated to a visit from our friend Christine who lives in Winnipeg. We met up with her for a drink in the club and she brought along a couple of friends - the parents of Andy Whyment who plays Kirk in Coronation Street - who proceeded to regale us with behind-the-scenes tales from the studios and also from Soapstar Superstar, which Andy famously appeared in a couple of years ago alongside Richard Fleeshman.
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