The Best Laid Plans...

First I have to say that the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations have been spectacular over the weekend and Bank Holiday Monday, and I've enjoyed watching them in between the unexpected disasters of the last few days...

The first couple of days was spent boxing up the stuff in the dining room area, so it was yesterday that we started to move the existing furniture, and that was when we found the problem- damp patches and mould at the bottom of the walls and on the carpet.

Now we have a downstairs bathroom and the tiled bathroom wall adjoins the dining room wall in the corner where I was intending to move into with my desk and computer.

It turns out we had a leak in the bathroom and as a consequence part of the concrete floor in the dining room is wet and needs to dry out before we can lay the new floor covering.

The walls have lost patches of wallpaper- they came away when I wiped the walls and skirting board with hot water and disinfectant ( fortunately the wallpaper is the type you can wipe over to remove marks).

So every dry and available surface is covered by boxes at the moment. And I'm still at my desk in the living room.

Fortunately the emergency plumber came out very quickly last night and did what he could-drained the hot water, so there was no hot water to wash with this morning.

And another plumber came back this morning to complete the work and finally sort our leak out. I'm glad it wasn't as bad as it first appeared to be.

Like any older house our pipework is in Imperial, while plumbing parts now are in Metric, so you can imagine how much difficulty that creates, the supplies on hand don't fit properly...

I'm glad to say the leak has been stopped, and very shortly there will be hot water available.

As to my move into the dining room area that's temporarily on hold while the corner of the floor dries out...

Add Your Suggestions to the Guardian's Interactive Map

Just a brief post before I start moving my desk.

The books section of the Guardian online newspaper is launching an interactive map of the UK's best bookshops and literary locations, and you can add bookshop reviews; while booksellers can add their bookshop to the map, or add a description if it's already listed.

This is a wonderful idea.

If you live in a city or the surrounding suburbs you may not actually know the location of small independent booksellers, and this is an easy way to find out where they are so you can visit them.

Alternatively if you're away from home, it's good to know where you can buy books, especially if you want to avoid the main high street book retailers and support these smaller sellers.

You can look at the map here, and there are links to add information on the page.

I hope there's no rain tomorrow, so I can move boxes outside while the furniture is shifted around indoors. (But the weather map on TV does not look good.)

By the time I write my next blog post I should have my desk and computer moved to it's new position; my reference books and material neatly stacked on a bookshelf close by and not a speck of dust to make me cough...