It's all downhill from here

We hit the mid-week that the locals call Wednesday, and I find myself at a peak, rather than a trough.  This may or may not be true.

I had to visit the doctors yesterday, to get my finger checked out.  About three weeks ago, I was trying to get a screw out of a piece of wood, and it was rusted in. So I decided that brute force and ignorance would win the day, and I proceeded to bang the pointy end of the screw on the concrete patch, to persuade it to move sufficiently to then all a screwdriver to remove it.  What I did not plan on was that my finger would also be between the concrete and the wood.  In fact, I may well have already told you that, so let's call this a recap.  Anyhow, my finger looks a bit like:

Now, this is obviously a library shot, and not my actual finger, since my finger is somewhat more swollen than that, with a large lump on the underside, that has been in the family so long it now has a name of Ermintrude.  The bit that made me visit the quacks was that it also has a "click".  If I flex the tip upwards, there is an audible click, and when an ex-nurse friend said "I should get that checked out if I were you" I decided it was time to get in touch with my feminine side, stop thinking "it'll all get better eventually" and get down to old sick shop.
I left the said establishment with a prescription for anti-inflammatories, and my finger buddy-splinted to the one next to it.  This later bit was really just for dramatic effect, but it will get me out of any washing up and lifting of heavy weights for a couple of months if I play things right.

The building proceeds at a pace.  We are up to damp-course level now, the hole in the middle is in-filled with large stones, prior to the concrete base, Celotex insulation and final cement base to the right level.  We had considered floating floor but to be honest, we are likely to go with tiles and the slight flex in a suspended floor can be the devil to a brittle think like a tile, as we found to our cost in the bathroom. 

Today, they will mostly be doing banging.  This is all part of the process of keying the new brickwork in to the old.  I have it on good authority from David that his builder screwed a bit metal strip on the existing wall, which had fold down bits that keyed on the pug layers of the new brickwork, which sounds nifty, but somehow I quite like the "chisel it out" method since it seems old-fashioned, which in building can sometimes mean "not as good as the modern stuff" but is often actually still better, although the new way is good enough and cheaper.  Same with the plumbing, which will likely be done by my father-in-law.  He is old school, copper all the way, and because of his experience, and the fact he does not want to revisit a job due to leaks, he always does a first-class job, and I like that.