Gimme Hilti or gimme death

The gasfitter has been and tied off our old gas fire on Friday. Finally, we can get cracking on our new fireplace. We have a hammer and a couple of chisels. P, our neighbour, helps us out again by lending us his electric breaker. The latter is unbelievably loud. My God, it's loud. I love making a mess (don't love cleaning it up so much), and hammering and chiselling a cubic metre's worth of brickwork and rubble out of the wall on a Saturday morning is very therapeutic. I'm in my element: full-on demolition. I could do this all day.

This is what it looked like halfway through.

And this is our newly excavated fireplace where our stove will go.

Now I'm surfing on ebay for cheap firewood and found a guy who is selling a 7.5-ton truckload of old pallets for £45 plus diesel costs. That sounds like a good price to me. 7.5 tons worth of old pallets will also stack up pretty impressively in our driveway and probably be going all the way up to our bathroom window. All I'd have to do is spend two weeks with my trusty Stanley handsaw cutting it all up and storing it.... somewhere else. I have a day to decide whether to bid or not.