Ick

It is 29°C in my flat at the moment. Summer has finally hit in the last couple of days and the sky is a whopping blue swelter.

So it's a bit unfortunate, with the sweat pouring from my bits, that we are still without a shower. The man came on Friday to install it, only to discover that the plughole is in the opposite corner from our old one.

Normally this wouldn't be a problem, you just stick a pipe underneath. But it turns out the shower is positioned directly above the joists holding up our floor. It would be... overly eager to cut through them to make space for a pipe.

So our shower is now up on bricks, or at least blocks of wood. It means there's a bit more of a step into it, but it all seems to work. See how lightly I explain this, when on Friday it was quite the crisis.

However, that cunning solution means the tiler had to come back yesterday, smash his work of Monday and Tuesday with a sturdy hammer, and then re-tile around the slightly different space. He had already tiled our bathroom once before, a couple of weeks ago, so not surprisingly left last hoping we would not meet again.

So tomorrow the plumber is coming to fill in the last gap between the bottom of the shower and the tiled floor. Then, once it's all dry and settled - sometime Tuesday or Wednesday, if we're lucky - we will have washing facilities once again, and I will not be quite so smelly.

But golly. It's more than a month since we first found we had a leak, and it's all been horribly expensive. And the cat hasn't appreciated the noise or being locked into the kitchen while work has been going on. Fag-ash Lil that he is, at night he's been rolling in the dust and gubbins, then traipsing that all round the flat. It might be his revenge.