Nightmare on the mead making front.....

Had a few minor victories recently. One of the members over at Gotmead kindly sent me a small strip of Fleischmanns bread yeast, so that I can have a got at a benchmark batch of Joe's Ancient Orange (it's not a UK brand so is unavailable here).

But the nightmare is, that about 6 to 9 months ago, my partner Clare, decided that she wanted the kitchen changed. Ok thinks me, shouldn't be a problem. She gets the ball rolling and gets plans, permissions, etc sorted and arranges the money to pay for it, etc etc. Again, fine.

She starts moving stuff around (she's a serial organiser/planner) in good time, etc etc.

As the start date for the work approaches, I start to worry. Moving 3 rooms worth of crap into the rest of the house and the shed, is starting to make things a bit cramped.

We get a bit closer to the start of the work and it's starting to dawn on me that I'm pretty much gonna be screwed for the 3 months or so of the works.

At the time of writing this, the old rear house extension bit has been demolished, the footings have been dug, re-inforced and the concrete has been poured. The brick layer is due in on monday morning.

The hassle really dawned this past week. The footings were due to be poured on the wednesday, but the concrete pump arrived and then promptly broke down, so the concrete had to be sent away  and the pump went back to the depot etc. So as the builders had nothing to do, they literally sawed the back third off the kitchen and boarded it up, along with the back 1/3rd of the dining room (both these rooms are being knocked into one anyway). This is all so that they can put the steels in for the roof supports of the new, bigger extension bit.

I suspect you get the picture. If I can actually do anything during the building time, I'll be very lucky. I've got to try and find room to do a bit of racking etc, as some of the batches I've got settling, ageing, steeping etc, need to be racked to reduce down the amount of space they take up.

God forbid, I'm even likely gonna have to put anything that isn't turning out Ok down the bloody drain - which I don't want to do as I'm a great believer that you can normally salvage any batches that come out rubbish, even if it's only to recover the alcohol to be able to use it for something else.......

I'll post again once I know how things are progressing etc.

For the time being, my home brew is "aaarrrrggggghhhhhh".......