Today the plumbers came back to finish their "first fixing" - and whereas earlier in the process I hadn't seen much physical change, today we got it in spades. The first thing they did was shut off the water supply and disconnect the few remaining old pipes.
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| Disconnecting the water supply |
Once that was done, they completely transformed the flat by moving the kitchen sink from its original location to its final location as per Andre's design. This was possible because we have kept the
mock-up of the kitchen in place. I was totally speechless when I saw this - they cut a sink-sized hole in the plywood that is serving as the kitchen "counter", separated the sink from the cabinet it was built in to, plopped the sink into the hole, and connected it to the new pipes they had installed.
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| Cutting the hole for the sink into the kitchen "counter" |
So it's just sitting there, almost free-standing, and the pipes are still exposed. With that done, they were able to re-connect the flat to the water supply, and turn the water supply back on.
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| The relocated sink |
As if that wasn't enough - having installed the
new boiler earlier in the week, today they installed the flue. More thrillingly, with the water supply completely reconfigured, they were able to rip the ancient, grotty old boiler off the wall.
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| Disconnecting the old boiler |
For the moment, it's still sitting in the middle of the living room, but somehow it already feels like there's more space.
The only downside to all of this excitement is that it's hard to even describe how much of a mess all this work made! The "living room" is
filled with dust, sawdust and bits of pipe - not to mention, of course, the old boiler and the now-empty sink cabinet. It's overwhelming just thinking about the clean-up job ahead...
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| The old boiler sitting on the floor - you can see where it used to be (it's the yellow area) with the hole from the old flue |
