Small delay to the flooring

We received a call from Herr Arkitekt (he of the bowtie) regarding the flooring situation. Seems that there's been a week or so delay in the Huf Haus people getting the flooring put on top of the floor heating pipes. And this delay will have a knock on effect on the overall schedule.

Some background...

The Dastardly Bob Salmon refers to something called screed which might be what all this is about, but one feels it's tacky to learn such vulgar blue collar construction words. However, what I do know is that some stone chip-type stuff gets put on top and all around the floor heating pipes, and then when it's all looking nice and level, cement (or it may be concrete) gets poured over the lot.

Yer then got to wait a week until this sets enough to bear the weight of the Swiss heating engineer and Huf Haus something or other engineer wot have to clump clump clump across said floor, descend down to the Keller area, walk across some more newly laid floor, and then switch on the bloody heating system. Heating system then hums for another week or so, thereby completing the two week floor drying exercise.

Now Huf Haus have a Christmas shut down period of two weeks. Very civilised way of doing business, one feels, that many companies around the world should think about implementing. The idea was to take advantage of this shutdown period by ensuring the bloody heating system is on before everyone ups tools and buggahs off to their traditional German christmas haggis dinners. As the floor needs a week to set before the heating goes on, that meant the floor had to have been down by last Friday 15th December.

Unfortunately, we've just heard the floor went down yesterday.

So, to truncate an already longish story, we have to figure out a way to coax out the local Swiss heating engineer sometime during the Christmas break. Possible, but perhaps unpopular as the company is located in an entirely different Kanton.

Even worse, we have to persuade the equivalent Huf Haus engineer to climb into his BMW, drive the 800km or so down to our house, even though his fellow German workers are all tucked up in their highland crofts watching telly. Even worse that worse, one feels that the Huf Haus engineer has only a bit of switch flicking to do, which is hardly an inspiring reason to make a 1,600km round trip. However, engineers being engineers, one can quite imagine that said job must only be done by a qualified Huf Haus engineer with a black-belt in switch flicking, and it'd be an unheard of precedent for him to give the instructions over the phone to someone a little closer to the ground.

In summary: we're delayed at least a week. And wot with that Dastardly Bob Salmon hitting a purple patch, one fears the tide has turned against us in the race to the finish.