Feeing like death today from a stinking cold and it’s WAY too cold in our heatless house! The Calor gas fire goes on as soon as we open our eyes, thermals are being layered already and it’s only November. I’m day-dreaming of a wood burning stove and toasty winter days, at least in our second liveable room – the office / kitchen. Whilst I sniffle, do landlord type paperwork and dream, Mr M’s drawn the short straw and has been digging up our front path for the new incoming water main.
Of course you can get someone in to do this, but it’s much cheaper to DIY as long as you follow the instructions from your local utilities company – here were ours. The pipe needs to be 750mm deep externally and there was much muttering as Mr M dug down into our very clay-y ground. Hard work! Once your new plastic pipe is in and up to the boundary with the road, your local utilities company need to be paid to come and connect the you to the road main. I’d say that paying this fee was the painful bit but then, I didn’t dig the trench, eh babe?
So why are we bothering? Well, the old one is both unhealthy, original lead and also comes into our long, sideways garden in a really impractical location metres away from the house. A really long trench would have been needed and to get the water feed to all the ‘wet’ rooms would have been a task and a half.
The idea is therefore to connect a new plastic one from the main road water main much nearer the house almost at the front door and come straight in to a much more central position, near where the water tank will be under the stairs. Because our house is a funny long shape instead of being square, this means we’ll get better water pressure to all the bathrooms and the kitchen – perfect! 
Getting that stiff new blue water main pipe to curl round corners and under the existing sub-site hasn’t been easy for him under the floor. I could hear a lot of swearing as I fed it down that hole you can see in the picture above.
One part needed a very small person to get in a very small dirty place. Guess whose phone rang when she was upside down brushing spiders away?! 
New builds are dead easy, lovely straight lines and easy routes in but existing properties can be tricky. Our new pipe had to avoid the concrete slab at the base of the front porch and come in through a side room then round a corner. Not easy with pipes not designed to bend!!
As you can tell, he was *really* enjoying this job:
And someone else was super impressed with all the noise and the giant snake pipe weaving like a weighty turquoise Voldermort through the house and making all sorts of weird noises. Missy stayed firmly on the landing looking down in a purely supervisory role 🙂
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