This week I’ve been doing a bit of tiling. First room is the cold store; it needed a floor. I’ve been picking up cheep tiles on offer at the DIY store, and thought I had enough to do a nice checker pattern. Two nice tiles: one a grey blue, the other an off-white. First thing – check the tiles are the same size. Oddly enough the white ones are 5mm bigger than the blue ones. Second – check you have enough of both colours. It was a small room, I could have just laid them out on the floor to check….So I got half way through and realised I was short of 1 while tile.

So after a quick trip into town I got the floor finished. They are ceramic so don’t cut using the scoring / snap method. I used a diamond blade in a 4″ angle grinder.  If you don’t want chips along the edge of the cut, best to put masking tape along the line of the cut, and cut through the tape. Turned out quite well, and the size difference in the tiles doesn’t look too bad!

Next I had a window sill in the boiler room to do, I had some odd sample tiles lying around so thought I would try to alternate them in a random pattern. Thought I would save time by scoring and snapping – bad move! I ended up going for the crazy paving look, and dropping the tiles on the floor the get more pieces.

I’m quite pleased with the effect, even though it wasn’t how I’d planned it!

I spent the weekend putting up the plasterboard in the new spare room. I’m trying to get a room completed so guests don’t have to sleep on the living room floor.

I’ve got the ceiling, and most of 3 walls done. The only wall left is the window, which makes it a bit harder.

I was interviewed for the Mike Parr breakfast show on radio cumbria, talking about our log boiler.

You can catch it for one week only on BBC iPlayer first part is about 40mins in, second part at about 1hr 51mins.

Prince Charles has paid a visit to Cumbria to see how things are recovering after the floods. He spent time on Cockermouth high street ( which has only just reopened to traffic), and at Wordworth House. He also visited my place of work  (James Walkers – biggest employer in Cockermouth) to see how well we were getting on.

It was all recorded for local news Cumbria starts at about 10 mins in, with the Walkers visit at 11mins.

I was working at home so I didn’t get to meet him

My work was badly flooded, haven’t heard the full extent of it yet.  One of my colleagues took the following picture.

Officially closed on Monday, except for key staff. I’m working from home for the until further notice.

We are all OK here in Johnby. Doing a lot better than Cockermouth and Keswick.

This is the river in Cockermouth at lunch time on Thursday.  Six hours later it was at least 8 foot higher.

This is a balcony over the river cocker, which is usually 2m down.

I went home before the worst of it happened; I can’t imagine how much water there must have been to get 8 foot flowing down main street.

Work wise my company was flooded, not sure exactly how badly yet. Reports vary from 6″ to 4 foot. Looking at the local news showed some aerial video of part of the factory, showing part of the carpark underwater. There were abandoned cars of which you could only see their roofs. The site is shutdown without power and I’m going to be working from home over the next week.

We have now switched over to our new boiler and solar panels. The boiler heats up the two tanks

The heating is then run from these tanks (we’ve disconnected the old oil combi). The hot water cylinder is heated by the solar panels and then topped up from these tanks. We burnt about a barrow load of wood to get the tanks up to about 70: 24 hours later they were down to 50 ( the hot water was topped up from this one) and 60. The solar panels have been doing well considering the time of year, yesterday we got 40  and today we got to 60 degrees.

The wood boiler is supposed to be very efficient, it burns very hot and gassifies the wood which is then burnt to heat the water. After all the wood we burnt there was very little ash left.

We had a few days away last weekend ( more about that later), on the way we stopped off a Beachy Head

They have started plumbing in the boiler room/ new boiler. Two enormous water tanks to hold all the heat from the boiler. I didn’t realise it was going to be so crowded in there, barely enough room to get them all in.

Cecilia says they look like darleks! They think they should be ready to fire it up next week!