Instead, we spent Tuesday evening with a very nice electrician, who was at the house for over an hour and a half, looking at the wires, in order to give us a quote for a few small things. Lucky guy. We discovered various interesting things about our home in that time. For a start, the consumer unit is in two halves; and we weren't very sure what the second half controlled. Some of it was labelled "storage heaters" which we don't have any of. We decided the two electric bar heaters, one in each of the two bathrooms, each had a fuse in the second half; but today we found the Blue Bathroom heater was wired to the ring main.

We only seem to have one ring main, which considering the 2 extensions the house has undergone in its 30 years, is quite impressive. Although one double socket (at the original house end of the extended living room) is wired to the second half of the fuse box... The builder who constructed the original, two-bed bungalow lived in it himself for around 6 years, and that might account for some of the oddities we've found. Like the filled-in inspection pit in the garage (every male who visits looks sadly at the rectangle of concrete where it once was), and the in-ceiling heating. Oh yes. It took the electrician to find this - we'd assumed it was just funny flat yellow insulation material in the loft. Its main supply wires have been cut though.

Meanwhile, the plumbers returned on Wednesday, removed the hob, oven and death-trap gas grill, and then announced the hole left by the hob was too small for the new one. We'd have to get a carpenter in. They departed. Paul bought a new saw, came home early and enlarged the hole, breaking new saw blade in the process. Plumbers return Thursday to relight a boiler (we have two) which hadn't been happy since the gas was off the day before. We show them the new hole - could they fit the hob? No - the other dimension of the hole is too long, they notice now, and needs to have some wood fitted, so as to support the far side of the hob. Off they go again. Paul finds wood in garage, and gets up very early on Friday to saw it, nail it and screw it so as to create a lovely smooth support for the hob. Plumbers return. Oh ah, they say, wood isn't fireproof, they can't fit the hob to that. Perhaps we should get a shallower bit of wood, and then tile over the top of that. They depart once more. We hunt in the garage and miraculously find a small pile of tiles, matching the kitchen wall in colour but not size, and just the right width to cover the new piece of support wood that Paul has now made. Amazingly there are exactly four tiles in the garage, and the worktop width requires four. We wash the tiles and prime the surface for them. On Saturday the plumber returns, fits the hob, gets it working, and sticks down the tiles. The hob is very impressive. Now the senior plumber elects to notice that there is a wall cupboard slightly over one end of the hob - indeed, it was positioned over the old hob, too. But they aren't happy leaving it, in case we set fire to the cupboard. The go away. They ring up and ask that we measure the height from hob to base of cupboard. We do. They um and ah. Later on Saturday they turn up again, take the measurements as we did, and hum a bit more. They await the arrival of someone whose name I never catch, but is probably Big Al. He is seven foot tall, and does eventually show up. He walks into the kitchen, waves tape measure, pronunces it OK as long as we sacrifice the front border at the bottom of the cupboard at the hob end, and leaves. The other plumbers follow, evidently happy to leave a safe hob at last, leaving us to remove the border. We haven't yet.