I worked until midnight applying more plaster base coat around the bathroom door and top coat in to the corners and over the wall joints.

I had my first hot shower on site - wonderful. However, I can see why people buy storage hot water systems. The instantaneous heater gave just enough hot water flow for a shower. A lot ended up on the floor (no shower screen until I paint the room) but it drained well through the floor waste.

The next morning I was up at 6.30 am and in to work by 7.30.

First I sanded back the plaster top coat on the bathroom walls. There was no problem over the flush joints where it had dried adequately but it looks like I will have to leave the corner flushing until next weekend for it to be hard enough.

One section of wall needed redoing where I discovered that I had pushed to hard on the flexible 150 mm trowel and there was not enough top coat.

Following this I found I had a few little areas where base coat was still needed - across the top of the door and some of the joints in the door area.

At this point Xavier and Eve arrived in their own car.

I put Eve to work brushcutting the long grass along the fence at the back along Ian's side.

Great job, and Eve was excited to discover some leeks growing wild..

She's keen to cook them but I'm a bit dubious - I told her I would watch her eat first and check for signs of poisoning.

Meanwhile Xavier put the final coat on the skirting boards for the stairwell area and checked out the reticulation from last week.

Then an hour or two loading the pine prunings on to the back of the utility to take to the green waste.

There is not a lot to take away as Ian, in addition to taking the logs, needs a whole lot of staves (anything from 50mm diameter up). So most of the work consists of knocking of the spindly laterals and loading them on to the utility.

As the day warmed up, Xavier and Eve moved inside and worked on lots of fiddly, very essential tidying up jobs.

This is great as it is saving me many hours of detail work.

Xavier applied a very good primer to the in sides of the recently arrived door frames, made more epoxy repairs to the kitchen cabinets, applied prepsol and the first gloss top coat.

Eve performed some very fiddly work cleaning back the back door frame that I had made a real mess of a year ago (paint runs from attempting to apply too much paint in one coat, chips and scratches suffered during installation)

This was a very detailed job that needed a lot of care and attention to detail to achieve a good finish.

Eve also managed to apply the first layer of top coat - we will apply two to three coats of paint in very thin layers to avoid the paint runs.

As the day cooled, they moved on to enhancing the reticulation installed last week and finished up as darkness descended.

Meanwhile I spent almost all of the day cutting the 300 mm floor tiles down to 150 x 300 mm tiles to use as risers in the corner of the wall and floor and for splash backs over the vanity and laundry trough.

As usual I was surprised how much time this took.

Xavier and Eve left about 7.00 pm and I then pushed on until 10 pm to install all of these tiles.

I'm not too sure about our colour scheme at this stage - it's a bit hard to tell if the marble effect tiles really work as splashbacks (style wise) while they have the green surface behind them.

I am getting very close to applying the final wall colour (Colorbond Classic Cream) as well as the grouting - so we will have to hold off on judgement until then.