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The guest room's coming along... but probably not quite ready for visitors yet. Here Mr B is smashing up the stove/steam engine he pulled out of the fireplace. I made a New Year's Resolution to stop being so stressed about Mr B's building works - for months I've been worrying that when he pulled the stove out the whole house would fall down. He (and a chimney expert we asked) assured me it wouldn't so when it came to actually doing it, I retired to the kitchen and left him to it. I was delighted to see when I came back that not only had the house not fallen down, but also he was wearing a hard hat (only the second time I've seen that) so obviously he did listen to me a bit.

Once the enormously heavy cast iron stove was broken up into small enough pieces, Mr B had a well earned beer in the sunshine and then we headed off to the tip. Later there was more terrace cleaning for me (it being warm and sunny again), and still later duck and chips for dinner.

The roof, by the way, was all sorted out this morning. The plumber showed up at 8 and the roofer at 8.30 and between them a semi-permanent solution was sorted out. The plumber has promised to come back next week to finish everything off in the house, and do a permanent roof repair, and the roofer has promised to finally give me a quote for the thing I asked him for in August...