Farewell avocado

It took us hours last night to move all our stuff out, find homes for everything and rebuild our bed in the study. It's nowhere near as bad as last year, obviously, but still very odd. The children are sharing a room again, as our son's room has been commandeered for storage.



Dawid and Darek turned up at 8 sharp this morning and started by forensically sealing the bedroom with polythene and tape to try and contain some of the dust. It was like an episode of CSI, without the gore. I almost shed a tear to see the avocado basin out in the skip - the times I've done the washing up in that! (A few before and during pictures here to remind me why I'm putting myself through this only a year after the last upheaval!)



Then it was off to drop the kids at their holiday clubs for the day while I ran round buying radiators and ordering a bathroom. This being a credit-crunch makeover I bought bog standard Wickes radiators at £100 for all 4, rather than the posh ones I had been eyeing up. But I know that the single rad in my daughter's room was £700 from Bisque and those balmy ( barmy?!) days are over for us for a while. I was intending to look at the designer range at B and Q, but in the end I couldn't be bothered to drive to New Malden or Chiswick. So bog standard it is, but hopefully they will be warm!



I went for Bathstore fittings in the end, partly because they could deliver on Monday. Have gone for the same basin we have in the bathroom and downstairs loo ( the Euro trio) with a corner shower cubicle that isn't the prettiest thing you've ever seen in the world but makes good use of the cupboard-like space. I did splash out on a posh shower though - the same one that we have in the main bathroom.

I came back to find the cornicing hacked off and the sagging lathe and plaster beginning to appear. I am planning to do very little tomorrow apart from choose a new plaster cornice from the catalogue at our corner paint shop - hopefully one that isn't too different from the original.

I'm wondering about tiles now - we have white glass sheets in the main bathroom and downstairs, but to be honest I'm not that thrilled with it because the fitting was so poor. Are brick shaped tiles completely dated now? I have a bit of a hankering for them, which I hardly dare admit to my husband because I pooh-poohed the idea when he suggested it for the bathroom. I think it's either that or 10cm square white ones. I'd quite like white mosaic but I can't help thinking of all that extra grout to clean!