Sorry Mum, but you will be here with me to clean up the mess.....

To a woman like me, making a hole in a wall and filling it with a framed window door is three days work, furniture back in place, dust washed away and house polished up on the fourth day bish bash job done. How frustrated am I then, we are on day two and I am advised that the making of the concrete frame so designed to look like block work to match the front of the house is going to take three days work starting from today.....I am really cool and things take as long as they do but I really kinda hoped to get the window in before my Mum and Brother Billy come for a visit and we may still have a hole in the wall.

The whole event, no pun intended, is actually quite interesting. Mike and Michael took great care to prepare the site with acrajacks to support the ceiling and then gingerly started the cutting and drilling to start the hole only to find a lintel at the top of the measured area and nothing but stone through to the inside. Both chaps thought that perhaps this back wall was solid stone and the easy job of cutting a hole in a clay wall became a distant expectation but as they worked away it became fairly obvious that they were clearing a blocked doorway and there had been an opening in this exact position way before the previous owners had rebuilt house. The timbers and wall lining are very old and we are non the wiser as to the date of this door way. I had a little twinge about making a hole in a huge wall but when we realised that we were mearly re-installing an old opening it all seemed more legal and moral.

So, today I still have a hole, Michael is coming first thing to show Mike how to strike the shuttering and set up a new set, Mike will continue for the next two days to complete the frame and then we will be able to fit the door and do the decorating.......sorry Mum, but you will be here with me to clean up the mess.....