A Willing(?) Volunteer Arrives

In my last post "Making a Mess" I mentioned - other than how much mess we'd made - that we needed a strong, manly volunteer to help Mat and I excavate the bath from the house since I have become weak and frail in my old age. Joking aside, I am not impressed with myself for this, somewhere in my very colourful CV it mentions my cement mixing abilities and hauling of rubble (I might not have used those exact terms in my CV) on a landscape design project. I'm stubborn. I'm just not the sort of girl who can't lift a bath for goodness sakes!

Anyway, enough grumbling. I'm a girl, I'm just going to have to learn to live with it.

So my little brother came to visit for the weekend. I should interject myself with a few bits of background information here:

• I'm originally from Kent, right on the South coast, about 2 and a half hours from where we currently live. And one of the reasons was want to be closer to the main roads in the new house (I might have already mentioned this in an earlier post, I apologise for repeating myself if so). Its not that far, but far enough that people visit us rather than just turn up for coffee whenever they fancy.
• My little brother isn't very little. He's 6 foot 5. Not very little at all. (and incidentally single and on a plane to Canada for the next few months at this very moment, in case anyone's interested!). But I always refer to him as little because he's 7 years younger than me. He used to be little.

So Richard (that's my little brother's name by the way) came to visit. Whilst saving for his latest travels, he's been working on a building site. Handy eh! So we put him to work. This sounds mean, it was actually only a couple of hours. And we fed him very well all weekend. First of all he drained all the water from the heating system. A plumber had been out the week before and condemned our boiler. We'd been trying and failing to get it working for a while, all the lights came on, but alas no heat. Turns out he found some big rusty holes in the pipes when he took it apart......good job we couldn't get the pilot light to light after all!!! So we decided the best thing was to drain the system down for the winter, so there was no risk of frozen pipes, take the old boiler out of the way and survive without water until we were ready to put the new one in. Mat took the boiler off the wall in pieces, leaving a nice big space ready for me to remove the rest of the surrounding cupboard at a later date.

Lovely double-denim again.....I'm so going to buy him a matching shirt.

Meanwhile I showed Richard the bath. "Hmm" I think those were pretty much his words. He took the door off the bathroom, took the feet off the bath, to make getting it around the corner easier. This didn't make it any lighter. And to be helpful, and because I plan to put it on ebay with "Free delivery: collection only" so someone else can come and take it away! I took a photo while it was turned on its side. Not my best photographic work I'm afraid......

See, cast iron, very heavy!

 Mat and Richard man-handled it out of the house. There was a fair amount of swearing on Mat's part I think. Richard's more the gritting of teeth kinda guy. Just to make it interesting the angles on the doorways (it had to  go a full 90 degrees immediately out of the bathroom) meant that not only did they have to lift, carry, turn, it also had to be turned on its end as well.

I realise now I've written 3 whole paragraphs plus a mention in a previous blog about moving a bath. I know I wanted to make the point that it was heavy and awkward and all, but even I can see this is a bit much waffle. Sorry about that.

Mat continued with the boiler demolition and Richard and I headed to the sitting room. I had previously also been trying to remove the old fireplace from the sitting room. Its a gas fire that had originally been a back boiler. Obviously fully disconnected now by the plumber when he condemned the boiler. Much like the bath, this thing was a Cast Iron Beast! This gas fire seemed to have endless attachments to other tangled parts of itself and the wall. I'd already spent a previous visit attacking it and had managed to remove the wooden surround, the front cover and various other bits but it was still putting up a fight. Richard stepped in to lend a hand and found more pipes behind it that fed inside the wall and through to  under the kitchen floor. Just to show off he decided the simplest form of attack was to haul it part way out, bending the pipes. I helped! So much so in fact that the part I was pulling broke off and I went flying backwards landing in the tool box. There was a lot of noise, Mat came running, the dogs panicked, it was very exciting. Richard held up the broke piece of metal "that's how strong Lana is you know".

He may be tall but it turns out he actually folds up quite neatly!

Then he chopped off the left over pipes and he and Mat were manly and carried it outside to join the bath.

I put a bucket underneath to catch some of the ash and dirt. It overflowed pretty quickly