The fitter arrived slightly later than on previous days, he had a small job to attend to first. When he arrived I pointed out the small chip that I had noticed in the tile. With a straight face he said ‘Well you will just have to look the other way!’, followed by ‘It will have to be lifted’.

I went upstairs and allowed him to get on with what he needed to do. The first job was to drain the central heating system so that the leak could be repaired.   A short while later I heard an exclamation, something had obviously not gone as planned! When I went downstairs a little while later to see if he wanted a cup of coffee he proceeded to tell me what the problem was; whilst fitting the radiator the pipe had pulled out of the wall, which required some repair work included a new tile in that area. I  was amazed at how easily he was able to ‘lift’ the damaged tile and replace it. The hallway was now looking perfect.

He installed the loo, the sink, loo roll holder and towel holder (luckily Mr C was able to come home at lunchtime and help supervise the placing of the latter two items).

When all the work was done the water was turned back on, causing some alarming gurgling noises. The radiators were bled and the gurgling settled down. The job being completed the fitter left and I had a few moments to myself before I had to go out and get some Christmas things sorted out.

Now all that was needed was for the dust to settle and a big spring Christmas clean before we put up our Christmas trees…

The fitter had hoped to complete our project on day six, despite the setback at the beginning of the job. Everything was going well until he came to fix the radiator to the wall; one of the pipes was leaking. This meant he would have to drain the heating system in order to fix it. Draining the system is a long job and he decided it was too late in the day because of the risk of any further complication. This meant that I would have to take the day off work whilst the fitter completed the final tasks. This was unfortunate because I had a meeting that I should have but my manager was understanding and insisted that I had the day off. She said she could attend the meeting briefly if needed and anything else could be followed up by email the next day.

I arrived home from work rather later than intended but still in plenty of time before Mr C had to go out; he was meeting someone for dinner. I decided to delay my own evening meal whilst the fitter continued working on grouting and cleaning the hall tiles. He eventually left at around 7.20pm, leaving me to put my ready meal in the oven to eat slightly later than normal.

After my meal I had time to take a proper look at the new tiling which was now cleaned of all the muck and dust from the day before. It was then that I noticed a blemish in one of the tiles; it was chipped in the opposite direction of the natural lines in the tiles. Once I had noticed it I was sure it would annoy me. Something to mention to the fitter in the morning…

Day five saw the start of the hall tiling which you may recall was the main reason for our project. Good progress was made but the dwindling light made it impossible to see to make the finer cuts on the tiles around the edge of the hallway.

When I arrived home after a day in the office some of the floor tiles were marked with large crosses. I was told that I couldn’t walk on these tiles until the morning. As you can see, this made navigating the bottom of the stairs a little tricky.

The tiling in the ’smallest room in the house’ progressed to near completion. The electricians arrived to fit the new ceiling light and fan, and apparently they were their usual surly selves so I am glad I was at work. At least they fitted what was asked for this time without grumbling.

When I returned home from work we had an appointment with the salesman from the company that supplied our front door from. One of our neighbours is currently having some work done by the same company so we asked if someone would call to measure for a new backdoor. The current door has bowed and is letting in cold air. Whilst the salesman was there we got chatting about the work they were doing on our neighbours house and we found out that they also fit garage doors. We having been looking at options for replacing our garage door because the current door is an up and over door meaning a lot of headroom is lost, making it awkward to place shelving units and maximise the use of space. They provide the sort of door we had in mind but  the salesman was able to show us an even more favourable option. This is something we will follow up on after we have had the new backdoor fitted early in the New Year.