I just handed in my last essay, so this is a particularly apt title. I'm also going to finish up the stove saga, see?

The chimney needed another coat of plaster and lots of tiles needed cutting last time. We'll start with the tiles.

Originally we bought a tile saw. Looks a lot like a hacksaw. All human powered and that. We'd kind of forgotten that floor tiles are quite a lot stronger than wall tiles. GG tried. She cut (slowly) through most of a tile. It made nasty screeching noises that had me running from the room - think fingernails down blackboard but amplified. Then, when she was nearly there, the tile snapped in totally the wrong way. Cue swearing. Around then I thought I'd go look for motorised tile cutters that we could hire. We found some too, but for around £35 for a weekend and we didn't have any entirely free weekends coming up to dedicate to it. Then we found one for sale from Screwfix for much the same price, meaning we could do a few whenever we liked. This one, in fact:

That little beauty is slightly scary. Sparks fly. The noise is quite something. It's water cooled even. But it got the job done much faster and with much less swearing than the hacksaw version. And we both still have a full complement of digits, so that's pretty good going!

The second layer of plaster (with a couple of little bits of polyfiller in places) was much smoother.

So we applied some satin-finish tile sealant to the tiles which has really brought them out nicely, and painted the wall.

Then all we had to do was wait for the stove. Which duly arrived, and slotted very nicely into the place we'd spent so long preparing.

The only slight problem is that we need to find a slightly squat kettle to go on top. The gap between the top of the stove and the lintel is only about 20cm. Still, I'm sure we'll find one. And in the meantime?

Fire...