9am: Asbestos Survey - an absolutely wonderful man came to look at our house and check everything for asbestos. We ended up chatting for about 2 hours about the state of the world, and what needs changing, and in the midst of all that, he took samples for testing. He thinks that there are very few items containing asbestos and that they are all reasonably low level in content. This is a jolly good thing as it means that I won’t have to worry about sealing up the house and paying people lots of money to get rid of things. The tiles in the living room and hall are highly likely to have asbestos, so we will be leaving them where they are and putting self-leveling compound over them, before getting laminate flooring (I keep on saying Lino, which winds Matt up - but for some reason cannot seem to remember the word laminate without a lot of effort).

9:45am - Builder came round to quote. He reckons the whole job will take 3-4 weeks - so I think I might have forgotten to mention some of the things that we want him to do, cos that seems far too quick!!! We’ll wait for his quotation, and then hopefully I can add all the other jobs too! But he seemed lovely and so we shall see…

After all that talking, it was time to tackle actually doing stuff on the house. I attacked the wallpaper on the living room wall to see if it was actually in once piece whilst not resting on the ground, or whether it actually had major cracks. None found so far.

No photos of the work today, but a photograph of the wonderful bulbs that are blooming at the moment in the rental garden - it’s a beautiful privilege that I wouldn’t have had if we’d been in our own house sooner, so that’s a lovely positive.

Enjoying the pleasurable result of someone else's hard work planting

At 4pm, we had a lovely local lady come and pick up the water softener, so that is one thing that has gone to a new home - hoorah!

Then in the evening, had a handyman round who was recommended by the previous owner of the house (well, the daughter of same, anyway). We currently have no banister to the stairs, just a completely open side. This is definitely an accident waiting to happen for me - so we’re trying to get that remedied as quickly as possible. Hopefully this handyman can fix this before the main work starts. What was very useful was the conversation where he mentioned that many of the houses in the estate have had living room floors that have sunk in the middle - because the whole estate was built on a marsh (what fun!!) Thankfullly, the council have put in a lot of flood defences, so hopefully they will all work…