View from the Loft!

Regular followers of this blip journal will know that we've been having our bathroom refitted (see here and here).

Well, for a variety of reasons (it's a long story) the fitters couldn't come last week to finish their work. Briefly, the main reasons included the fact that they'd fitted the shower too low and they had to wait for a new chrome pipe to be delivered, but also sadly the best friend of the main fitter (Jeff) committed suicide which very understandably put Jeff out of action for a few days. Yesterday he arranged for a colleague of his (Ian) to come and do some more work for us; hopefully Ian will be here tomorrow to finally finish off (then it's over to me to repaint the woodwork & walls - that might take a while, the sash windows are fiddly!).

One of Ian's jobs yesterday was to drill through the brick wall of the loft above the bathroom so that an extractor fan can be fitted with its vent pipe going up through the ceiling then out through this wall. I was fascinated to watch this being done as he knelt in the corner of the loft holding his powerful "core drill" - it's like an enormous electric drill attached by a stout shaft to a cylindrical thing rather like a huge apple corer with diamond saw teeth round its cutting edge. Ian was pleased to find that, although most of our (solid) walls are 3 bricks thick, they slim down to 2 bricks thick in the loft. (I watched the action from a safe distance; I was amazed at how neat a hole it produced.)

The fan will be fitted tomorrow, so today was my only chance to grab this shot of our neighbour's house through the aperture. I had to use an HDR technique to get the exposure right for inside & outside which meant carrying my tripod up into the loft; I think I've now managed to get all the grime and brick dust off the tripod now! The only processing I've done is to use Photoshop's HDR module to merge 2 photos plus a bit of contrast/clarity tweaking - no cloning or the like.

I hope I don't get a reputation as a Peeping Tom!