Our builder has been in today (bless his heart – he’s so busy he’s blown us out a couple of times this week and now has ended up working on a Sunday to try to catch up). He’s quite a sweetie and takes a huge amount of pride in his work so we give him the ‘seal of approval’.

He turned up this morning with a mate who manhandled this machine while he did his stuff. He’s a really efficient and fast worker so was only here an hour or so but it was an hour well-worth it for us. We’re now almost at the point in which our wood-burner can be moved and plumbed in so we can use it. Hurrah for that as it’s starting to get quite nippy at nights now.

When he got here, with his flat-bed truck and this cement mixer, I just thought the shot of the day had to be the mixer because it looks so out of place in this wild landscape scene. Of course the other side of the mixer is the truck and our house so it’s not so isolated as it looks but still it’s a fairly incongruous shot for me. I did ‘manufacture’ the scene in as much as the long-handled shovel was not propped against the machine when I arrived!

Now he has only one more day’s work to do for us and that’ll be the last we see of him for a while…..but a short while as we’re already lining him up for the next step of the grand plan.

DM, after consultation with a local specialist, is planning to do the next step of this project with Iain who’ll do much of the technical work with David as his trusty gofer. I have been protesting a lot because I don’t want to spend my precious weekends up to my ears in plumbing and the rest of this sort of stuff but I feel sure I’ll get sucked in if he goes ahead with the scheme. He has assured me I will be able to keep well away so I hope, when the fire gets lit for the first time, he’s proven right and I’m wrong. We’ll see!

DM was getting worried last year that I had plans to make him into a twinkle toed ballroom dancer!