Grey.

A very restricted view today with low cloud bringing soft rain. I wasn't tempted out except for a brief foray to photograph some wet garden plants.

My first job of the day was to finalise the layout for the utility room. I wanted to fit in as much storage as possible though it's not a very big room, has two doors and where I want to put cupboards there are corners. I don't like corners, they're awkward especially when you have to fit in a washing machine and a fridge-freezer. In the end after some shuffling round of small bits of paper on a scale plan of the room I'm happy with the layout. The sink, washing machine and another cupboard will be in a line while the fridge will have to stand on its own on another wall. 

Having worked out what I need I then had the fun job of going on-line to to order everything. That went well until I came to choose the worktop. As it's a utility room I'm going for cheap and functional so I went straight to the laminate worktops where I couldn't decide between wood effect or grey stone effect. In the end I chose wood effect to match the wood effect ceramic floor tiles. Then I thought to check the real wood worktops and for only another £10 I can have a beech worktop so that's what I went with. 

The next stumbling block was choosing possible tiles for the main bathroom. I haven't found anywhere here that I can actually look at tiles apart from an expensive kitchen place so I thought I might be able to buy some sample tiles to include with the order from Wickes so I don't have to pay a delivery charge. It was frustrating to find that most of the tiles said suitable for bathrooms but not suitable for wet rooms even though they show a photo of them in a shower. I looked up the difference between a shower and a wet-room and it seems to be that a shower has a tray while a wet-room has a sloping floor. It looks as if a sloping floor might be an expense too far for us so we might compromise with the biggest low profile shower tray instead. In the end I chose two tiles to look at. One a cream coloured stone tile and the other a white/light grey marble effect ceramic tile. I placed my order, filled in all the necessary details and then things ground to a halt. They had no delivery slots in the next 7 days and don't book further ahead. So now I have to keep checking every day until there is a slot available. After all that I had a break and watched my current favourite tv programme, The Great Pottery Throwdown. I don't usually eat lunch but today I treated myself to one of last night's buns, they heat up beautifully with a one minute low setting blast in the microwave.

After my break I went on to order the sink, white with a single drainer, and moulded border tiles to top off the half wall of tiles going in the separate toilet. And that has been my productive day.