A window of opportunity

English: A Window of Opportunity, Birmingham If you like 1960′s monster architecture, you’ll love Birmingham!This is the upper part of the House of Fraser building. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was expecting to do some work at home on Wednesday morning but was told that we were going to be visited by our son and his two-year-old daughter around ten o’clock. His wife had been dropped off in the neighbourhood for a meeting she had so rather than make the trip back home our son and his daughter came to stay for an hour or so. It was nice to see them both of course for most of their visits I have to say have been infrequent and short-lived to date. There are good reasons for that of course as our son is the only one with a car and he is often at work as a policeman. We chatted and he explained that his wife’s mum had been taken ill last Friday with a suspected mini heart attack, in fact several of them, and she was rushed to our local hospital. She was later transferred to a specialist unit in a hospital in Liverpool where she received a stent implant in one of her arteries. She is a healthy and fit lady, eats sensibly and exercises but it is believed that her condition is hereditary. My son was concerned that the ‘defective’ gene might have been passed down to his wife and subsequently their daughter. We hope of course it hasn’t and it is not conclusive that it might. Sadly their visit was curtailed when his wife phoned to be picked up from her meeting and they left around midday. It was too early for lunch so I was looking for something to get started on in the bathroom. My first intention was to cut and lay the plywood that had arrived the previous day but when the weather changed for the better I thought about fitting that part of the new drain pipe system we have installed beneath the floor which exits the building and is connected to the main clean water downspout. We had left that short piece of old pipework still connected as it meant leaving a hole in the wall until we could fit the replacement. In order to do that a ladder was required and it had to be dry weather with little or no wind as the work was all at high level. A window of opportunity was needed both for the weather and for the right moment in my work schedule as I have been concentrating on other things. With a little help from E I set about making that change and we had it done in a little over an hour with the brickwork sealed around the pipe with mortar. I will complete the connection to the drain pipes I have already installed when that mortar is set hard and I have decided on where the drain for the wash basin is to be located. That may well be done by the time you read this. The only remaining high level work outside in connection with the bathroom project is that of installing the soil pipe to the new position for the toilet waste but that can be left until most of the other work is done and indeed even after the floor has been laid. That also requires a window of opportunity as far as the weather is concerned. It was too late to do much more in the afternoon once we’d had lunch and as I am working away from home on Thursday it may be a few days before much else gets done. Yet another window of opportunity eh?

Shirley Anne