Its nine years to the day since we moved to Oak Tree House, moving my worldly goods from Broughton Astley and Chantal’s worldly goods from storage in Leicester, aided by Simon, Matthew and Simon’s friends Slug and Mick together witha very large hire van. The heating didn’t work, and the first evening was spent under a duvet.
Claire got a bit upset because there was no Christmas tree, and so the first job on Christmas Day was to locate one from the piles of boxes, and then somehow find the decorations.
There followed several traumatic weeks, summarised in a letter to my Sister Pauline at the time, after I forgot her birthday in the following February. I have kept a copy:
Dear Sister,
All right, all right, I know……I missed your birthday. Sorry! And I missed Dad’s. I seem to have had my routine temporarily thrown by everything that’s been going on in the house. So I thought I’d better tell you all about our “house with potential” so you can get some idea of why I’ve been a bit distracted.
Well, first the heating didn’t work. We’ve got this “pot boiler” as it’s called:
Looks pretty, and basically works by dribbling oil into a couple of pots in the bottom, and burning it. Bit like a Primus stove, but less efficient. You couldn’t boil an egg on our boiler, particularly as it wouldn’t stay alight. Luckily we have an open fire, and Christmas was mild, but the days either side were spent with heaters and trailing cables everywhere, because not all of the sockets worked Richard Hayes and I stripped down the oil valve things, and got the boiler working on New Years Eve, and so things improved thermally. We now have warm, but not hot, radiators. The boiler is OK for 4 or 5 radiators – we have 15. And the boiler always smells of diesel. A few weeks later Mr Hackett the Boiler Man came to service the boiler. He took one look at it, said “Oh dear – this doesn’t look good” – it wasn’t safe because of a plastic supply pipe, and so he wouldn’t service or repair it, but he did take it apart with me, and showed me all of the built up carbon stuff which had to be scraped off, and gave me lots of advise and contacts for a new boiler.
After he’d gone, I rolled my sleeves up, opened the boiler door, and got stuck in for an hour or so, cleaned it beautifully, and it’s been working reasonably well (for its size, with a slow and thirsty response) since. Having cleaned the thing, I almost decided to have a shower, but decided that a wash would suffice, which is just as well, because five minutes later there was an almighty crash from upstairs, followed by the sound of running water. I ran upstairs (meeting the cats running in the opposite direction), to find that the bathroom ceiling was now in the bath:
This was not totally unexpected – we’d had buckets to catch drips on the floor for a while, but a job allocated for spring was now urgent. Soon afterwards it snowed through the bathroom ceiling, we had heating that was just about adequate, and very soggy looking roof boards above the shower. Mr Doggett the Builder promised a visit as soon as weather permitted, and sure enough, within about 3 weeks he came with Mr Hodgett the Roofing Man. Mr Hodgett and Mr Doggett said “Oh dear, this doesn’t look good”. The roof was boarded with chipboard, and felted with shed felt. The roof boards weren’t lifted off. They were shovelled off.
Interestingly the other half of the flat roof was boarded with very solid floor boards, and was fine. On the other hand, we have found that Matthews bedroom floor is boarded with roofing boards…..
Earlier, Martin the Electrician called to look at the dodgy sockets and lights. He said “Oh dear, this doesn’t look good” (spotting a pattern yet?). It needed a total re-wire. And so while Mr Doggett and Mr Hodgett were on the roof, Martin and his Merry Men were beneath the floor boards:
While we moved the furniture around as the electricians worked their way around the house. It took 5½ days, but we did take the opportunity to have extra sockets (including outdoors) and lighting
A couple of Sundays ago, Claire, who was down for the weekend, visited the bathroom. “I think that you should come up here” she shouted, “this doesn’t look good”. The toilet cistern was overflowing, but instead of a trickle of water from an outside overflow pipe, we discovered that our overflow pipe stopped just below the cistern, and the overflow was flooding the bathroom. The house stopcock wouldn’t turn, and we’d just had a new water metre and stopcock, which doesn’t look anything like a stopcock, and I couldn’t turn the water off in the road. It was 3.45pm with Sunday shopping hours. I now know that I can get to B & Q in Hinckley in 9 minutes, returning to rescue Chas, who was kneeling in a soggy bathroom with about 50 soggy towels. Replacing a worn out toilet flushing device is not easy with a steady flow of water, especially since the isolating tap that I bought was the wrong one. Everything was very fraught, until Richard Hayes and his bag of tools came to the rescue, although even he had a bit of trouble.
Of course the small sitting room (with the boiler) below the bathroom was also somewhat damp, with a dripping ceiling and waterfalls down two walls. Two days later we realised that the dripping hadn’t actually stopped. In fact it was getting worse, and the ceiling was bulging. A collapsed ceiling is not the sort of thing that one really wants to experience more than once in a fortnight, so we punctured the bulge and released the water, but it still kept dripping. We realised that we had clearly loosened a pipe joint during the bathroom panic, and so had to rapidly demolish some wooden box stuff to get access to the pipes to tighten the joint:
The small sitting room is now drying out nicely, but smells of damp, as well as diesel.
We’ve had several plumbers come to quote for a new boiler. They’ve all looked at the existing plumbing, and said “Oh dear, this doesn’t look good” (I promise that they have all said something to this effect), taken lots of measurements, and gone away scratching their heads, never to be heard from again. I think that plumbers prefer nice new Barratt houses. Luckily I realised that a plumbing friend of ours has fitted oil boilers, and he came to measure up for a quote last week. Of course he said the same as the others, and then said that all the pipes were 15mm when they should be 22mm and the radiators were on backwards and seem to be of various ages and quality and he really recommended starting again. We are waiting for the quote, which we will definitely get, because we know where he lives.
Then there was the telephone. It has always hummed disconcertingly, but it got increasingly crackly, and when it got to the stage that the internet wouldn’t connect, we knew it was time to do something. So I phoned Mrs Beatty the B.T. Lady (oh, alright, I made that name up), who had to phone me back on my mobile because she couldn’t hear me over the crackling. Apparently there was an earth fault, probably at the exchange. So the Telephone Man called, and spent ages tracing wires, and applying his meter (despite big kisses from Josh every time he knelt down). And yes, as he tried to sort out the route of our cables he did say “Oh dear, this doesn’t look good”. But he found the earth fault, and he put it right, but it was inside the house. That will be £50 call out sir, plus £50 because I was here for an hour, oh and by the way I’ve had to disconnect the extension in the small sitting room (which is now dampish, has a small hole in the ceiling, smells of diesel, and has no phone). But he was very apologetic, and we did get a modern telephone point installed.
We have had a huge oak tree taken down successfully. This was a bit sad, but it totally blocked the light to the house, and the light to the neighbours, and so we are quite popular. The “professionals” did an excellent job:
Leaving the amateur to spend a weekend logging the wood for the fire, and shifting the woodchips for the garden before the professionals came back to collect what was left:
So you can see that its been a bit of a succession of time consuming events for the last few weeks. Which is not an excuse for forgetting your birthday. Merely mitigation…..
Sorry!
Technically we live in Oaktree House, but sadly the tree had to go.
We now have a thriving Oakstump at the front of the house.
