Let the blog see the rabbit...

Went down to my sister's new house in Maidstone with my dad and brother to help her and her boyfriend continue decorating.

Since I last went, they've finished decorating the master bedroom and sanded and varnished three floors - their bedroom, the dining room and the lounge.

Graham spent the day wrestling more wallpaper off the dining room walls and I played at being a cable engineer. Rather than send an engineer out, Telewest are now running a scheme whereby they send you a set-top box and a cablemodem via Parcelfarce and leave you to set them up. It wasn't hard - it was just slightly annoying that I had to phone them up and read them a great long list of serial numbers off the hardware to get it all activated.

Once I had TV and Internet access working, I moved to the hall and attacked the mass of extraneous cables running wild across the floor. Careful detective work revealed which of these were phone extensions, all of which were surplus to requirements and so I removed them. I was then able to send the remaining cabling under the floorboards leaving the hallway cable-free and the skirting boards around the house rather lighter on pointless phone sockets.

There's still a bit more work to be done on the Internet front because I've discovered that the wireless signal doesn't make it from the lounge (where the Telewest cable point is) to the office (where the computer is). I suspect I will need to wall-mount the wireless router somewhere high up and run the Telewest-supplied gargantuan CAT5 cable through ducting to it.