Now you’ll know already if you are a regular here, that I am a complete tools junkie. I had a very well-stocked toolbox before DM and I got together, along with a rather splendid collection of really cool power tools (including a router – that impressed his nibs). These days, my tool kit has been consumed by DM so my toolbox is now empty apart from a few old bits of rubbish and my tools are all impossible for me to find when I want one.

(There is a point to this, which I am coming to just about now!)

This morning, almost the first words he spoke to me were ‘I hate this place, let’s sell up and buy a Barratt home’. I was more than a bit crestfallen because I was actually feeling quite positive – nice day, good job done yesterday, Sunday so no work, tomorrow another bit of the jigsaw due to go into place, a meeting scheduled for tomorrow with Rosie – all making a contribution to good humour.

We both get like it from time to time – I have had my own ‘moments’ in recent days and so today is just a balance for that.

His reason for the blues was the crashing realisation that he had a job that he couldn’t put off any longer that he really HAD to do today. He had to move the woodburner with back boiler out from its existing home in the dining room ready for the plumbers to get it hitched up in its new location in the lounge – they’re due at 8.30am tomorrow! (And guess who phoned them and arranged it? Yep, you guessed it, yours truly!)

He prevaricated and fiddled around with other stuff until lunchtime, by which time I was being driven up the wall and down the other side because I had to play a role in this too and I was looking forward to it no more than he was.

We are opposites – when I have a problem, I can’t rest until it’s sorted one way or the other so I like to grasp the nettle and then move on. He, on the other hand, likes to do an ostrich and only deal with stuff when he has no other alternative.

Why is this job his? Well, I wanted him to organise for a local company to come and do it months ago and he turned them down because they couldn’t come until the end of November (yes, November 2006) and he said he could do it more quickly and more cheaply himself……..no prizes for guessing what happened there!

Perhaps not surprisingly we argued about it, I lost!

BUT you see, I feel as though I work too hard to be faced with doing jobs like this as well. I will work like a dog but I like to have some degree of choice about what work I do. This would have been almost, though not quite, right at the bottom of my list of jobs that I’d like to do.

So, with both of us as gloomy as gloomy things, we started the work after lunch. He got his tools (pictured) and tried to get the pipe-work uncoupled. One pipe came undone no bother and the other was in a really tricky spot with poor, dirty access and he couldn’t get it undone with spanner or wrench. He asked me my opinion and I was childish enough to say ‘it’s your project, I wanted nothing to do with it yet here I am’. (Very grown-up as you can see.)

So, the tools are HIS tools, for HIS job, that I take no responsibility for at all, shot on HIS background (rather wittily I thought)!

Anyway, the job actually was done quite quickly and the stove is now on a wheeled trolley, loaned to us by Iain, waiting for the plumber in the morning. Cool bananas.

Last year, I had my first little bit of gardening in Cornwall experience!