Every house has its story. What's yours?

Wasn't there an Access credit card?  Sure there was - your flexible friend.  It had a stupid little face an it and made a kind of Rolf Harris noise.  It makes me feel old.  I don't have a TV, see, and I don't read a news paper and when Radio3 interrupts my enjoyment to titivate me with with a nice suburban baby-strangling or the latest in the USA reign-of-terror I switch it off if I can.  So I'm a bit out of touch.  I have a credit card, but I haven't been able to use it since some scro-bag in Halifax helped himself to its details and I had to cancel it and I don't know the PIN for the new one I got.  Can we petition for it to be a criminal offence to say PIN number?  I'd like that.

SO anywho, access:  I've a six-by-six bathroom (that's 1.8 metres square if you're not conversant with imperial British nomenclature) and six years ago I did a lovely job boxing in a slim-line cistern.  I took the boxing across the whole wall and all at the same height as the window ledge and it kept all the visual noise to a minimum, which in a tiny space worked really well.  I got a lovely little sink from a salvage yard and set it into a little alcove in the boxing and created a cupboard underneath, all flush with the boxing, and then made a removable tiled lid for the cistern so I could get to the ball valve should I need to.  What I didn't do, because quite honestly it just seemed like way too much hard work, was create an access panel to the bottom of the cistern so that I could replace the flappy syphon valvey thing in the unlikely eventuality that it should flap less than efficaciously.  Which it started to do about a year ago.

So for a year we've needed to pump the flush like a sports jock on prom night.  Well last week I fixed it.  Displacement activity is a wonderful thing.  I committed myself to NaPoWriMo and so it seemed like a good time.  Hacked off a couple of tiles, cut through the ply-wood boxing with a Stanley knife and key-hole saw, fashioned a jamb, cut a panel, fitted the magnetic catches and trimmed the opening with some nice aluminum trim.  I still have to cut the tiles for the panel and stick them on but the loo now flushes with just a gentle stroke of the handle.  Isn't technology wonderful.