Slates arrive

A slow day today. The slater arrived this morning with a lorry weighted down by a load of Paramo slate from Spain. The slate is beautiful - a very dark grey colour with flecks of gold through it. The rest of the day was spent building the scaffolding, pulling out the fence on the other side of our entranceway so that we can still get vehicles in and out (albeit across the grass!), and sorting the slates into piles on the scaffold. I expect we'll see them going onto the roof early next week.

The builders' boss came round this afternoon with a great idea that hadn't occurred to us before - putting a pressurised hot water system in the void space above the utility and shower rooms, and using it to feed not just the extension, but also back into the main house. Given how much valuable space our current hot water cylinder occupies, and how poor the flow rate is from it, this is a brilliant way to do things. It will also save us putting in an electric shower and two under-sink water heaters. So we can have a proper big shower head - joy!

(All of the above depends a bit on how much extra it's going to cost. We don't know that bit yet.)