Decommissioning the Conservatory, Part II

Amazon lived up to their promise and my missing things (drain pipe extension and adjustable spanner) arrived before midday, so I could promptly get started today.

Drain hose extension was simple enough. Though I thought I had an ingenious idea of how to get the pipe into a hole, across the back of a set of drawers and then out the hole on the other side... I used a gardening stake to bridge the gap then pushed the pipe along it to the other side. It worked really well!

Then I tackled the water pipe. Took a bit of effort - I had to find a way to hold the valve itself while I undid the nuts either side it. Managed to use the other spanner to do this somehow. 

Yesterday I had raided Dad's tool cupboard for plumbing consumables. I say cupboard but warehouse would probably be a more appropriate term. Anyway, I mention this now because out of all the things I borrowed, all I needed was the sealing compound to smother over the ends of the valve. 

Then I had to change the switch under the sink into a plug socket. This was a simple job - just needed to swap the front plate over. 

So job done, you might think. No. It could never be that simple! Turns out that I had completely forgotten to measure the length of the power cable and it wasn't long enough by about 30cm!

I had some cable left over from the firstborn's bedroom, so I tried that and it was 10cm too short. Better, but still not there. So there was nothing else to do but try and blag it with Tracy and see if I could get away with using one of the worktop sockets instead. But she was having none of it. So off to the DIY store I went and stocked up on way too much stuff but future me will no doubt thank me one day.

So now I just needed to recable the washing machine. It seemed to take forever but I got there.

Anyway, it's all done now and looks good. There was the usual faffing to get the washer level and steady, tidying up and stopping the children from arguing but it soon came together.

Time for a nice cold drink. Or maybe some of that nice cherry mead. Or maybe both.

Tracy's job for tomorrow is sorting things to go in storage and then I've got to take it there and then help empty whatever is left in the conservatory. Gonna be a busy week!