One step forward ...

Did I say we had a plumber waiting in the wings? Silly me. In the time honoured way of many, though not all,  of our tradesmen, this one apparently vanished into thin air. No promised quote was forthcoming, no answer to my subsequent text either. This was someone who had done three jobs for Claire and who we therefore thought would be a fairly safe bet, but it was not to be. I found another one, who came to case the joint one Saturday morning. I did have some slight misgivings about this one, mainly because he couldn't find the address, in spite of having the postcode and detailed directions which no-one else seemed to need and when I walked up the road to find him and told him to take the next turn on the left, he decided that left actually meant right and was on his way down the turning opposite ours before noticing me waving frantically behind him.

Once again, silence reigned after his visit and again, my follow up text went unanswered. Time for plumber number three.

"Can I just ask you," said Keith when the bathroom tour was finished, "If you don't want the job or can't fit it in, could you please let us know? We've had two other plumbers who said they would give us quotes and we haven't heard from them again."

Plumber number three assured us he would certainly send us a quote and made a careful note of my email address.

Fast forward two days and plumber number two decided to get in touch after all and send us his quote. It was not wonderful but then he had come armed with a glossy catalogue of bathroom suites and everything else you could need or want in a bathroom.

"I think we could do it ourselves, you know," said Keith. "It's pretty straightforward." 

He had already decided that he would be able to do the downstairs toilet himself and had bought the toilet, wash basin, tiles etc and as for the en suite, we had decided that we would just take out the toilet, move the wash basin and finish tiling and decorating in there rather than getting rid of it, so this could be the logical next step ... 

Anyway, before that, we have the re wiring, which will begin tomorrow morning. Now here, we have struck gold. We have a brilliant electrician and his team who will be on our doorstep tomorrow at 8am, but there will be more to tell on that next time.

More jobs

Well, if all goes smoothly, our electrician should be starting work at the end of this month and before we know it, we will have plug sockets which are a) convenient and b) useable and we won't have to switch on the Bakelite light switch under the stairs for the hall light switch to work. 

Speaking of under the stairs, first impressions were of something akin to the black hole of Calcutta. We had talked of putting a cloakroom there, just a toilet and wash hand basin but hadn't really planned to do it any time soon. However, the eighties bathroom seemed to be begging to be updated and the ensuite to be removed altogether, so we thought it might be a good idea to bite the bullet and do it all.

When I say do it all, we have a plumber waiting in the wings, with attendant tiler, so they will take care of the bathroom and, hopefully the ensuite, but apart from dealing with the plumbing bits, Keith has decided to undertake the downstairs toilet himself.

.

For some reason it had an extra wide doorway and a bi-fold door so the plan was to replace that with a normal doorway and door. However, Keith then decided that the 'wall' under the stairs, which would form the side wall of the toilet, needed replacing.

So that has been our main occupation over the past week, plus buying and putting up a small garden shed because, although Keith now has an office AND a whole garage, there is no room for my garden tools, lawnmower, strimmer etc. (I know! Unbelievable!)

One reason Keith decided to start work on the understairs toilet was that the stairs were creaking - a lot. His plan was to have me walking up and down the stairs so that he could pinpoint the worst areas and then squirt glue in, helped by a few screws where needed. This was eventually what he did, but only after he had discovered that whoever had installed the extra wide doorway had been able to do so only by sawing off the top newel post just above the doorway.

Yes, instead of the door frame and post supporting the top stairs, it appeared that the stairs were supporting the door frame and post. Visions of us abseiling up to bed that night danced through my brain but fortunately, it didn't come to that and Keith was able to remedy the situation.

The man deserves a medal!

Instead, I treated him to - an angle grinder. Doesn't everyone want one?

We have the power!

We hadn't been in the house long before we realised that there was a surfeit of electrical extension leads everywhere; the four-way or six-way ones which often come in useful when you want to plug in several electric items but find yourself with only one socket. These days, the need for places to plug in, charge up and access all sorts of electric appliances seems never to be satisfied and even in our twenty year old previous house, we never had quite enough. However, although back in the sixties, we were perfectly satisfied with a mere handful of sockets, fast forward to present day and that is no longer the case, not by a long chalk.

But still the full picture had not dawned on us. We rang an electrician and asked him to come and quote for installing more sockets.

He came, took one look at the consumer unit under the stairs and then there was a sharp intake of breath.

"Can't do that, I'm afraid, there's no earth suitable for the RDC trip here" - or words to that effect. As I wasn't even sure what a consumer unit was, he might as well have been speaking Russian.

It soon became clear though, that although the wiring was not actually dangerous, a re-wire was definitely needed.

A brief tour round the house followed to document what we wanted and what was needed.

You may be familiar with the story of a tourist asking a local for directions somewhere in Ireland.

"Well if I were you," the local man said, "I wouldn't start from here."

A variation of this followed in subsequent conversations with the electrician.

"If you had come to me before you moved in, I would have advised you to get the re-wiring done beforehand."   Well, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but we are where we are, I thought.

But there was more.

Ideally we'd like you to move out and store your furniture somewhere while we do the work.

Bearing in mind the fact that I had just spent weeks packing and hadn't even finished unpacking here, I think my reply was reasonably polite and measured. It was along the lines of  'not a chance in hell, mate!'

There followed at least three conversations via text in which the electrician did his best to persuade us. His start date moved back a month and the quote increased by £1000 'because of all the extra time it will take us' and, to cut a long story a little shorter, we said good-bye to him and found ourselves someone else who doesn't need us to clear the house and can start at the end of this month.

In the meantime - don't trip over those extension leads ...!

Surprises - and more surprises

On our first night in our new home, we slept like the proverbial logs, although as we had a vertical blind but no curtains in the bedroom and it was still just the beginning of July, sunrise was early, which meant that Keith was up and ready to start the day at 4.45am. This was the beginning of a habit which has stayed with him over the intervening weeks. I, however, am made of sterner stuff and have managed to contain my energy and excitement until a much more acceptable six o'clock.

We knew that this house, built in 1960, would inevitably need some renovation. The Homebuyer's Survey had mentioned things like the flashing on the chimneys, gutter and drain cleaning and fence replacement and suggested that in the future, we might want to consider updating the kitchen and bathroom.

Fair enough, we thought but no rush, except that I would quite like a flexible tap for the kitchen sink. 

It transpired, however, that, although the kitchen units looked fine on the outside, the murky interior depths were a different story. A good all-round description would be 'manky'. This kitchen was going to need somewhat more than a new tap for us to regard it as useable. Insult was further added to injury when I inspected the oven, for which even the term 'manky' would not be an adequate description. The fact that at our old house, I had almost climbed inside the oven to make sure I left it as spotless as a used oven can be, only added to my annoyance. 

The state of the cooker meant we could treat ourselves to a new electric oven and gas hob (to replace the halogen one already there) except that, although there was a gas supply in the house for the central heating, someone had, in their wisdom, decided to completely remove all signs of it from the kitchen. There is a gas engineer working on restoring the connection as I write and until now, we have been making good use of our camping stove, bought years ago for our trips to France.

In the meantime, Keith has come into his own with all his DIY skills and we have now replaced almost all the units and worktops.

It's still a work in progress, mainly because of another 'surprise' we had, but that's for the next post.

Leaving and Arriving

The removal firm we decided to use was a pretty reputable, mid range one and we contacted them quite a while before we had a removal date as we thought it would be wise to plan ahead because of all Keith's 'stuff'. If you are not aware of the amount of 'stuff' we are talking about, have a look at  his YouTube channel and you may get some idea. Suffice it to say that the contents of a workshop, his van and half a garden shed were not going to be easy to move, so the agreement with the removal company was that they would come the day before the move to pack up his workshop, store it overnight and come back the next day to load up the house contents.

 However, it soon became clear, as Keith started to pack up some of the stuff, that further solutions would be needed. Men were dispatched several days before the move to collect what had now been offloaded into the conservatory and that was taken away to be stored.

Two days before the move, the rest of Keith's stuff was taken, leaving only the house contents. Nearly home and dry, we thought.

"We'll be here at eight o'clock on the dot on Wednesday," said one of the men, leaving us in no doubt that an early start was planned for that day and we had better be ready. This van load was to be kept overnight in the removal company's facilities and driven up on the Thursday, which was our official moving day.

Wednesday morning dawned, last minute things were packed away and as much last minute cleaning done as possible.

Eight o' clock came and went, as did 8.30. When Keith and I rang, we were given different excuses: the men had 'checked in', the receptionist said, she had 'definitely seen them', followed later by,

 'There's a puncture on the van. They're just waiting to get it fixed."

To cut a long and boring story short, the crew (three men now instead of two) finally arrived at 10.30 and we worked out, using our Sherlock Holmes skills, that they had probably been doing another small job on the side before coming to us.

"We might be old but we're not stupid!" roared Keith, having told them and not being contradicted, that we just didn't buy the story of the puncture. 

The foreman, who had decided to play it hale and hearty and 'what's all the fuss about?' visibly blenched and stepped back as he realised he needed to add a little contrition into the mix. 

There followed fervent promises to pull out all the stops and get on the road by 1pm, which did actually happen but, as Keith said, a stressful day, bringing to an end nearly twenty years of living in that house, was made all the more stressful by the events of that morning.

However, the van departed and so did we. We stayed in a hotel that night (kindly arranged for us by Kathy and Claire) and got the keys for our new abode just as the removal van arrived, to be followed the following day by Keith's stuff. 

Keith now has an 'office' adjacent to the kitchen and a garage. Filling them both, as you can imagine, has not been difficult but filling them with the right things in the right places is still a work in progress.

Time for updates!

Yes, I know. I came back and then disappeared again. Annoying, but hear me out ...

If you have been wondering whether Keith and I had suddenly been dropped down a hole or vanished from the face of the earth, you wouldn't be far off the mark, especially if you consider those possibilities in internet terms. Before our move, Keith had done lots of investigations and discovered a few useful bits of information:

•  BT could not provide a broadband service in our new area any where near comparable to our existing one.
• Therefore, instead of charging us for the remainder of our contract (£700) as they had initially threatened to do if we changed provider, they were forced to concede defeat and allow us to leave our contract with reasonably good grace.
• This meant we could change to Virgin for broadband and TV (we had already left Sky TV) and get a very reasonable deal.
• Our new house was already set up for Virgin, although the previous owner hadn't used it.

Virgin said we would need an engineer to get us set up as the equipment already there was not up to date, so we ordered the TV box, modem etc plus an engineer to get us up and running.

As the big day approached, Keith was constantly getting encouraging texts for Virgin, including three offers of £150 to let the engineer come earlier than the arranged date, which he regretfully had to decline as the house would not yet be ours.

Moving day arrived (with its own problems, for a later post) and the following day, July 1st we were expecting our package of goodies plus engineer ...

The equipment arrived, plus more encouraging texts about the engineer, who sadly didn't.

After much to-ing and fro-ing of phone calls, it finally transpired that no engineer was available until four days later, so internet-wise, we were indeed down a black hole, made all the worse by the fact that there was no landline and the mobile phone signal, which we had been led to believe on their website was good, was pretty well none existent. Apparently the local mast had gone down and attempts to access it for repair were scuppered as the farmer on whose land it was, refused to let anyone near it, so the company were having to take him to court. Yes I know, you couldn't make it up.

All of this, however, made it abundantly and infuriatingly clear how much we depend on the internet and mobile phone network these days. If we had had a decent mobile signal, we could at least have done some of what we needed to do with a temporary dongle. 

Anyway, as you may by now have guessed, we are here, safely delivered and tomorrow the story will continue - hopefully! (This photo shows the view from the front garden of our house).

Tiptoeing ahead

We have been quite lucky really. I have harassed our solicitor (who in turn harassed our seller's solicitor), got the Homebuyer's report back quickly (no awful problems this time), and the searches, which apparently can take forever in some council areas, were done very quickly and didn't produce any unwelcome news.

Meanwhile, I carried on filling boxes and organising what was to go into them. I was reminded of a news item I once heard about someone who, throughout the many years he had lived there, had collected newspapers and magazines, stacking them up around the house as he ran out of room, until the only space he did have was a network of narrow walkways to enable him to get around the house. I think one of the TV drama series once featured a similar storyline  but in that case, the character was crushed to death when the piles of papers fell on him. Well, we're not that bad yet, but this house is pretty compact, so the boxes are beginning to loom somewhat. 

Since I wrote this post, contracts have been signed and exchanged and a completion date has been set.

I feel I want to throw my hat in the air and shout "Hurray!" as I write that but there's nobody here except Toby. Keith is outside hovering over the removal men who have come to collect the rest of the workshop contents (yes, they did come back!) and if you have ever seen a mother hen clucking over her chickens, that's Keith with his machinery.

This morning, I have carefully packed up my Apple Cinema Display monitor, which dates from 2003 but which is still absolutely fantastic, and I shall be threatening the removal men with severe consequences if anything happens to it. :)

Meanwhile, things are beginning to move elsewhere!

Could it be that we are getting there?