I had planned to have a nice lazy week before Easter. It didn’t quite turn out that way, as the “maintenance” on the house turned out to be more extensive than I’d hoped.
On Monday I had a landscape gardener and a structural engineer come round to look at my back garden and suck their teeth. Chris and I had a long-term plan to sort it out, which I’m considering putting into practice. That is likely to be an ongoing saga, so is worth a blog post or several in its own right.
It took several attempts to get the locksmith to come out – his wife was ill, so he had to rearrange. Even so, he’s still not fixed the locks, but has at least sized up the problem and knows what needs to be done. He’ll be back next week I hope to sort it out.
After he’d left again, on Thursday morning, I went to have a shower, only to discover that I had no electricity whatsoever in the extension. The rest of the house was fine, but not the shower-room, nor (crucially) the utility area with the washing machine…. The symptoms indicated that something had tripped, but all of the little trip-switches in the consumer unit were fine. I couldn’t see anything wrong, so thought I’d better call out an electrician. It took a while to track down one who would come out over the Easter Bank Holidays and not charge an absolute fortune for doing so, but I did find someone who would come out on Good Friday. He turned out to be an ex-scientist from the place I work at, who was made redundant a month before Chris was, and used his pay-off to retrain as an electrician. He spent several hours up in the loft tracing the wiring before he found the source of the problem and fixed it. And while he was up there he said “You do know you’ve got a wasps’ nest up here, don’t you?”.
Yikes! I hate wasps. Fortunately, I’m on first-name terms with the local pest-controller, and have him on an annual retainer and speed-dial. He agreed to come out first thing on Saturday morning to deal with the nest. On further enquiry, it became apparent that his idea of “first thing” on a Saturday morning and mine were several hours different, so we had to negotiate a compromise. But at least the wasps nest is now dealt with. And for good measure he removed a dead mouse from the loft as well.
I’m hoping that this week coming I can spend more on “me” and less on chores, so that I can go back to work next week with re-charged batteries.
