A rare day off work dedicated to the house, this at the behest of the plumbers to make sure they do what is desired. As a quick recap of the plumbing saga: The boiler was installed but without putting new pipework in. This was subsequently done but by replacing the steel pipe for smaller copper pipe, resulting in a loss of water pressure. This then, would be the day that everything was sorted out.
The task was simple: replace the 15mm pipe for 22mm pipe (178mm^2 to 380mm^2, more than double). Up early and started work on the house at 7am, sanding and preparing the kitchen for a weekend of painting (!). 8am came and went. So did 9am. Still no plumbers. Come 10am a phone call went in to find out what time they were turning up. It turned out they were on a first job and should arrive around midday.
Meanwhile the delivery of plasterboard arrived, ready to skin the stud walls in the dining room and shower room. The replacement shower mixers arrived too (the wrong ones having been sent originally), though the delivery man didn't want to know about picking up the dud set.
Eventually the two chaps arrived and after assuring themselves of exactly what their most demanding client wanted, set to. More sanding of the kitchen followed. A little after 1pm, the cavalry arrived - Anthony McDonald. Fully boiler-suited and equipped with his own sanding tools and more, ready for a hardcore weekend of home improvements.
At about 5pm the plumbers suggested they had replaced all the pipework and how did it look? The hot water gushed and swarmed out of the bath tap, a veritable torrent of near scalding water. Hooray! And the cold tap, did it perhaps lower the flow rate a little? Herein came the stumbling bloc. It had no effect on the hot because of the pitiful dribble. It was embarrassingly weak.
What ensued was and hour of fault finding, opening every tap, bleeding the house down repeatedly until the faulty section of pipe could be isolated. The ground floor outlets were all great, as was the hot. Thereafter, the cold was useless. The obstruction was in a section about 2m long with three bends in it. Everything was bled dry again and the coupling heated to melt the solder and allow disassembly. Only, the first joint didn't really do that. A sign that there was water held just above it, sapping the heat away from the joint and not allowing it to heat up. Eventually it did come apart and a little prying later, a plastic bung was extracted from the bend.
How on earth it got in there is a mystery. That the blocage was found at the first try was a blessed relief. With everything back together, the water was turned back on and tested. Gushing hot water again and this time, cold too. At last. 6:30pm on a Friday evening and finally the main plumbing has been completed. Only a month or two after it was started.
Back in the kitchen and the walls are smooth and ready to be washed down and the beam has been revealed to be a nice piece of oak which we intend to leave unpainted. Time for a slap up curry and a few beers.