How to Build an Extension to Your Home :: Part 4

So when you build an extension to your home there are very strict rules about your cavities.
This is the gap between the inner blocks and the outer blocks which has to contain sheets of insulation and then a bit of space and absolutely no detritus.
The building inspector (Lucy) has been to check Bookhound's cavities and declared them quite the nicest and cleanest she had seen that day, in fact better than the nasty, messy cavities of the professional builder she had just been to inspect.
There was much rejoicing chez dovegrey.
Then ye on the seventh day he rested and Bookhound decided to have a break from building and do a week of digging instead, because your extension also needs its services. So it was time to bring back the digger on hire (cue rain) and sort the water supply, the drains and the electric cable all of which resembled an enormous web of tangled Fair Isle knitting, just using pipes instead of wool.
The electrician (known as the sparky) came to add an extra few feet to the electric cable and that was almost very exciting to the tune of an ambulance but thankfully disaster was averted.
I, the great uninformed indoors, declared in a loud and irritated voice that the water had gone off.... something often trips out the electric pump that brings the water up from the bore-hole. So I summoned the Gamekeeper (occasionally useful for his height) to switch it back on again on the main circuit board, not realising that the electrician was outside and had switched it off, and was at that moment holding the live end of the main cable from the National Grid.
It was one of those slow motion, frame by frame, frozen moments in time...
... the Gamekeeper reaching up with his hand on the switch about to flip the electricity on
... Bookhound running (really running, not just pretending) in the back door screaming DON'T TOUCH IT
... the Gamekeeper, despite being a good 3ft taller these days, instantly transported back to his childhood and fortunately obeying his father's edict (it wasn't ever thus)
... and the electrician thankfully living to see another day another dollar.
We took an executive decision not to tell the sparky (getting the lingo here) what had happened because we'd like him to want to come back.
But we all paled silently and visibly at what might have been and had to sit down for a minute.
So after several days of what Bookhound described as playing with very big bits of Meccano, miles of drains and pipes and cable have been joined together and laid, bedded in pea gravel and all buried safely back underground. It's like the London Underground underneath there.

Bookhound has now had his drains inspected by Lucy (who seems to live here at the moment) declaring them the prettiest network of drains she had ever seen and there was yet more rejoicing chez dovegrey.
The next thing we have to think about is windows but I think that might be enough excitement for now.
Oh yes, and today's our 34th wedding anniversary so it's another day of rest before he gets back to his project, and yes he still says it...he would have got less for murder.
And so would I.