The rest of the week has been taken up with Ross and Graham breaking up and removing the old concreate floors. Because of the limited access this had to be done by hand and wheel barrowed out. The two guys looked exhausted at the end of the day and were absolutely cover in dust. Anna did what she could to keep their spirits up with supplies of coffee and home bakes! By Friday the bases were levelled and the insulation was down ready for the underfloor heating pipes to be laid on Saturday and the concreate poured on Monday.
During all this work a second water supply to the house was found, but the stop cock to this was not. In fact no working stop cocks to either of the water supplies have been found yet. So Ross asked if I would phone Scottish Water and ask them if they could come and investigate. This I did on Thursday afternoon. Friday morning a man turned up armed with various pieces of equipment including a metal detector and started looking for our elusive stop-cocks. Whilst there are at least four visible out the front, none of these turn off the supply to the house! After some hours searching and testing he had to admit defeat for now but did manage to cap off the supply that we were not using so that it could be removed from the house. Scottish Water are going back to see if they can find someone who might know the arrangement here, failing that they will put a new stop-cock in. I’m very impressed with the fast response by them on this matter.
The slight worry we have at present is the possibility of the weather deteriorating however Ross has plans to make the now exposed rooms weather proof should the predicted storms arrive. What none of us want is the driving rain to damage the new decorations nor to soak the currently exposed electrical consumer units! We have four guys on site on Saturday as they will be laying the heating pipes so Anna and I are currently waiting to make coffee for them all before we go out into Kirkwall shopping.
Yesterday we met up with Peter and Frankie at the Skerries Bistro in South Ronaldsay for lunch which was great. The Restaurant has changed quite a bit since we last visited and we had a lovely time there. Before arriving there we had popped in to see Nick Card and we got a couple of Guides to the Ness of Brodgar signed for Frankie who is a keen amateur archaeologist.