Something you often don’t appreciate is how tiring crouching is. Bending, straightening, bending down again, somehow seems to sap the same amount of energy as a sprint race, by the end of the day.

Having completed the main block of tiling last week I now needed to measure and cut the edge pieces before attaching them in the same way. Though a comparatively small area, measuring and cutting the tiles took a fair bit of time, as most needed to be cut differently to their neighbours due to the lack of straightness in the walls.

With the tiles in place the next job was to remove any bits of tile adhesive that sat too high for the grout to cover it. Finally, I was able to add the grout. Having waited for it to dry a little I sponged the worst off before returning to it the next day to clean off any remaining grout marks on the tile surfaces.

Although there are one or two places where the tiles aren’t as flat as I’d have liked, overall I’m pretty pleased with them. Chris, with his characteristic perfectionism, offer a, ‘Well they were never going to be perfect’…

While I was busy with the various stages of tiling, Chris was getting frustrated with electrics. I’ve never had to plan an electrical circuit round a house, but according to both Chris and his brother it’s where motivation goes to die.

Wanting a break from the headscratchings of the electrical world, Chris decided to busy himself throwing the old concrete from our floor into the sinkhole in the garden. Recently more of the ground has sunk down and he’s worried if we don’t start filling it soon it will collapse in on itself. Though it doesn’t look very big on the surface, throwing a rock down at the right angle results in a clatter…clatter…clatter…bang…bang…bang…roll, indicating something much deeper than feels comfortable.

Having lost all the concrete in the hole, Chris returned to his electrics, and I began to add the half bricks. Having moved perhaps half a dozen wheelbarrow loads of half bricks, the visible floor of the hole hadn’t gotten any higher. Our initial plan had been to sell the full bricks on but now it seems they’ll serve us best below the surface.

Although having a sinkhole in the garden is a little off-putting, it’s far enough away from the house for us not to be too concerned. It does however (from the sound of the echos) appear to go under the road, which is more worrying. We did inform the council of this, but so far they don’t seem particularly interested.

Having finished the floor I set to work plastering over the worst of the unevenness in the internal walls, as well as covering over Chris’s wires. Plastering is a very slow and very boring job, not to mention exhausting. I’m looking forward to seeing the back of it.

In order to prevent the plaster drying out too quickly we had to cover it in hessian. We have a very large roll of hessian, which was one of the first things we brought for the house. Having spotted it very cheap on Marketplace, Chris decided to pick it up, despite knowing we wouldn’t need it for quite a while.

Another bargain-buy of the week is out new ceramic kitchen sink, only £26 off Ebay.

Once more tired of electrics Chris decided to start plumbing in our downstairs toilet. It’s exciting to see our first room slowly coming together.

Outside, the garden, still full of rubble, broken toilets and scaffolding, is nonetheless looking nice, with lots of spring blooms.

Unfortunately, not every fresh shoot in particularly welcome, with the young Japanese knotweed already appearing. We’d hoped last year’s treatment had seen it off, but we’ll simply have to treat it again this year. So far only one patch has reappeared, so maybe the rest has gone afterall?