An intruder in the garage

Polystyrene coving had to come off.  Once very popular, it's now recognised as a fire hazard.

A yellow wall to add to the pink, orange and green walls elsewhere!

Yesterday we stripped all the remaining wallpaper off the walls; only the kitchen left, but we're leaving that room alone until the old floor-standing boiler has been removed.  It's a messy, fiddly job, stripping wallpaper by hand and we were very glad to have an extra couple of pairs of willing hands to give us a lift.  At the end of the day we had several bags full of old wallpaper, stacked in the garage.

Typical chaos at the end of the day

This morning, bright and early, we went to load up the car for yet another run to the tip.  I started carrying the bags to the car when N shouted that I was dropping paper all over the place.  Looking down, I saw the bags had big holes in them.  Funny, didn't notice those last night.  I picked up another bag and found the same thing.  More holes.  An uneasy feeling began to float through my mind.  Along the lines of: something is making holes in these bags.  Then I spied a pile of, well, poo, in the corner of the garage.  Uneasy feeling becomes full-on panic.  We have 'guests'.  We began a tentative search, and found the culprit.  

And then realised that neither of us had a camera with us.  

Our intruder was a hedgehog, trying very hard to burrow into yet another bag full of old curtains.  I was immensely relieved as I had visions of rats running riot.  We very carefully (hedgehogs are a bit prickly, after all) extracated it from the curtains, picked it up in a towel and carried it out to the back garden, leaving it in some shrubs to find it's way home.  

An exciting start to the day =:o

The rest of the day didn't pan out quite as we had intended it but sometimes you just have to go with the flow, regardless of planning or not.  We managed to get a bit more work done, N pottering in the 'bathroom', while I was up and down the stepladders, washing the sticky gunk off walls - yuk!

Temporary taps removed, replaced with isolating valves

The shower tray has gone, leaving just a hole in the concrete base

We've had the design back for the kitchen.  There's not much scope for anything too radical, and as the kitchen needs to be functional rather than fancy, we're happy with the plan.  What has caused us a problem is the dining area, we just couldn't see how to make it work for us.  Not wanting to give up on this problem area, we've been discussing all sorts of possibilities, measuring up, drawing up scale diagrams on graph paper etc.  Today, finally, we came up with a way of incorporating the area into the kitchen and making the whole room feel more integrated. 

We cobbled together a breakfast bar using various bits of the old kitchen units, then 'sat' on imaginary stools to see if our idea would fit the space.  We think it does.  Now we just have to hope we can get it built.

Tomorrow the heating engineers are coming to fit a new boiler.  Floors up; pipes cut, removed, and relaid; radiators off the walls - yep, we're so looking forward to it!!