how are the mighty dismantled

I was most pleased to find both doors locked when I returned home after the first day of operations and more pleased to find relative undusty cleanliness and a big gap where the false ceiling above the kitchen used to be. Unfortunately the two bits of wire I'd attached six years ago to make sure the structure was still supported when we removed the post propping it up from the worktop beneath had been put in the bin and thrown out though the various bits of pipery which carried the air extracted from the kitchen space by the extractor fan to the space above the lowered ceiling in the bathroom (the bathroom fan does the reverse; fuck knows what the dingbats who installed it were thinking) had been retained and will eventually be taken to an allotment and converted to shed-guttering. Apart from a few large lath-exposing holes the state of the ceiling wasn't that bad but the addition of an entirely new flat ceiling a few inches beneath it should help muffle the sounds of the woman upstairs clumping about at almost no cost to the airy spaceness gained by not having a 7" ceiling above the kitchen-bit.

An unforeseen impediment is the end of the pipe which used to have something to do with the tank which previously occupied a twelfth of the false-ceiling volume. The tank was removed and the pipe capped off when the central heating was replaced but the pipe protrudes from a wall a good few inches and emerges below the line of future ceiling. There's a little bit of play in it but nowhere near enough to shove it back into the wall and shoving it about too much is not something I wish to do when ten minutes with a couple of bicycle lights and a pair of ladders revealed that it joins up with the mains inlet and has the potential to gush large quantities of deadly water everywhere if handled inconsiderately. Plastering-bloke had left a note noting the obstacle and wondering if we wanted it boxed in or if it could be shifted, leading me to worry that he'd already been waggling it about a little. I initially preferred just boxing it in in such a way as to not interfere with the future placement of cupboards but a bloke who has a plot near Nicky's (who lent them a cordless drill/driver on Sunday when the crap one they were using ran out of power for the second time) is apparently plumbing-enabled and could conceivably be persuaded to competently seal the end of the pipe after a swift reduction thereto. Whilst happy shutting off the mains, removing the current cap and draining the pipe I'd be nervous that the unseen and plasterboarded-away pipe-end was slowly leaking if I had anything to do with re-capping it.

Plaster-bloke had also noted the uselessness of the extractor fan but hadn't appreciated that the hole in the wall just led to the bathroom ceiling-space and not to the outside one might expect an extractor fan to lead. As he's buggering about with the plugs and switches anyway (mostly due to the big hole where the heating thermostat used to be and the superfluity of the fuse for the removed immersion heater and some random wires which I never satisfactorily identified) we'll probably get him to shift the wires for the old fan to above the hob, plaster over it nicely and leave the ends protruding for us to try and find some form of filtering-only non-extracting hob-cover thing at some point in the future.