This means I had all sorts of wonderful assistance on Saturday.

I had a few hours on my own before they arrived. This worked out well because I really needed to spend some "quiet time" looking at the levels and working out a strategy in the main laundry area.

From East to West we had a good, consistent fall. The tricky issue was dealing with the raised floor level at the entrance to the bathroom.

It turned out that the laundry area had the same problem, in the same place - so it just flowed in to a gentle correction of the level in one corner across two metres.

I established levels in that corner and then protected it with metal strips.

Then I set up another island of cement partway across the room and also protected this with a metal strip.

This then allowed me to screed easily from East to West.

I mixed a few loads of screeding myself until Laurent took over.

I was a little concerned about cement drying on to the mixer bowl because I was working quite slowly and I didn't want to drag the mixer outside to wash it after each load.

I hit upon the idea of throwing in half a bucket of water after removing the load in to a wheel barrow.

This water allowed me to do a quick cleanup of the bowl and I could use it for the start of the next load.

It turns out that this was not a brilliant idea as the next load of sand ended up stuck to the back of the bowl.

In the end we decided to use the bucket of water idea, but to empty it out and throw it away before starting the next load.

I worked steadily on screeding the whole day, much more efficiently than last week and managed to do about three quarters of the floor area.

This included scraping back a local grade at the floor waste pipe.

If I had really pushed myself I might have been able to complete the whole floor but I would not have finished until 10 pm in that case.

An old injury in my right elbow started to hurt so I decided to just get the screeding down to the point where I could scrape in the local grade and leave it at that for the day.

Laurent and Deborah did all sorts of other wonderful things during the day - finishing off the brick stack, bagging up leaves, a LOT of brushcutting, shovelling clay and more.

A very productive day with extra assistance very much appreciated.

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Sunday - while I was working on screeding on Saturday, Linda went to look at a 'P trap' toilet I had noticed in Eldridges. It met with her approval - so she brought it home on the back seat of her car and on Sunday we took it out to site to see how it looked.