"There are two types of people, you see. One type keep their heads straight, and look around as they walk. The others look up - at the tops of houses, at the eaves and the lintels and the roofs, which can tell you when they were built - and I've always done that." Peter Ackroyd

One of the jobs that has been nagging away in my subconscious was attending to the lintel over the front door. It was clearly rotten and in need of replacement but it has always seemed the sort of task that was easy to put off in preference to something less complex. New year, new resolve - surely a good time to take it on, especially as it needed to be done before I could continue framing the downstairs.

Working around the central heating pipes made it a slightly trickier job, but after a few scratchy head/strokey beard moments we worked out a sequence. This involved strengthening decayed beam ends

temporarily supporting the existing stonework above the doorway

and replacing the wood with concrete lintels (see second picture) Tomorrow will see the rest of the lintels installed and the rafters chocked and braced. A lesson learned here - not dealing with a difficult problem results in it seeming even more difficult when in fact it was never that difficult in the first place