Last time I spoke to Conny a few days ago she had seen the progress report and said she was "scared": she didn't quite use the words "disaster zone" but she said it "looked worse than mum's" house^Wconstruction site (which I really, really doubt - I for one knew exactly how much work this would be - and how to do things mostly solo).

Anyway, this here progress update is dedicated to my lovely daughter, to alleviate her worries :-)

First thing after the not-so-great mortaring of the hob was to fix that. I had managed to break one hebel block on pushing it into the mortar and that bit hadn't bonded properly. As this was at the front of the shower corner I certainly couldn't live with a hollow-sounding, badly fixed block there. So I sawed it out, chiselled the mortar off the slab (where it had bonded perfectly) and re-mortared the block in. Now it's good.

Next was putting in some concrete/mortar/screed to make a proper gradient in the shower. I lugged home a number of 9kg sand+cement mix bags and one of floor leveller and started making a mess again.

When I was a small child I very much liked playing in the mud ("dreck-daggen" as we called that in .tirol.at) - my parents certainly remember how I often happily played with slow-worms in some mud hole while they were wielding the trowels, but I can't exactly say that a lot of fondness for concrete or mortar has survived the intervening 30+ years.

Anyway, after improvising a screed (an old piece of angled aluminium) I created this shower base, complete with a slope of about 1:70 (after reading some SA standard that says 1:60 to 1:80 is recommended). I couldn't help leaving my mark. After drying and taking the orbital sander to it the surface now looks quite alright to me.

After some more farting around with floor leveller I have declared the floor surface "good enough" (it's going to be tiled over anyway) and put in more waterproofing, which - while also a gooey mess - is a substance much more to my liking.

As you can see above I've covered all the corners where water could conceivably end up trying to invade the poor matchstick structure that pretends to be a properly built house, and I didn't forget the "bond breaker" tape either.

After that I took care of the (hopefully) last bit of messy work - fixing the plasterboard of the bathroom-hallway wall on the hallway side. This was a super-straightforward exercise of ripping the old stuff off (less straightforward: deciding on the go that doing the whole wall is better than just doing some smaller panel), screwing on the new stuff and plastering the joints. The last is still in progress because I happened to buy the "fine" filler, which I shouldn't have because it shrinks a lot.

That's the state of affairs today. On Monday Rob will come over and help me getting started with the tiles, so the end is in sight if not exactly very close yet.