State of the house

The bathroom has a floor again, pretty much. We wait upon the plumber again, to come and put the bath back and reconnect the basin.

New floorboards are cut slightly narrower than old floorboards, necessitating wizardry with saws. I find this peculiar, but there it is.

The kitchen ceiling is ... well, a little more broken than it was before. I think the joiner trod between the joists, just once. Too bad: it'll have to stay that way for a while. I might knock off all the loose stuff and slap a coat of paint over what remains. Might do. Might do the same to the walls, too. It couldn't look worse.

State of the house/Chaz interface: hmm. An unreliable connection. Mostly I hide in here and answer elaborate questionnaires, apparently. Still not really doing actual work. And I've run out of pseudo-work, I think: or just conveniently obliterated from my mind whatever next I was supposed to do.

I sort of want my house back, but the plumber must come first.

11.28

Plumber predicts another hour. Joiner and I will believe him when we see him. Meanwhile, heavy bath is heavy, but we have manhandled its cast-iron self back into place all by our frail and fleshly selves, so that he can build a frame around it and I can - well. Come back to sitting here, poking at the keyboard, poking at the internets, poking intermittently at story to see if it wants to play after all.

Sometimes I think I must be very annoying.

In other news:

I trod on my reading-glasses. Oy. It never things but wossname.

So we're back to sliding the regular glasses down to the tip of my nose - which is some distance, let me tell you - when I want to read, in that traditional manner that one just desperately hopes is kinda cute, until such time as.

12.50

Still waiting. What is it about plumbers and punctuality? Why must they plumb the depths of my patience? It isn't nice down there...

In more other news:

When you find people on both sides of an argument equally creepy and disturbing? It might be time to stop reading the internets.

Except of course that this isn't really other news at all, because the rest of that sentence is "...and do some real work," and I can't do that for my house is full of saw-sounds, thumps and waiting. Mostly waiting.

13.09

They're here!

13.38

Heh. Of course there are worse things than hearing a plumber say, "Well, I can't see where it's coming from..."

Of course there are. Many. Just, I'd sooner not be hearing this, right now.

13.50

They come, they spill water on the floor, they make a lot of noise and then they go. Plumbers: loud and cheerful and quick.

Joiner: the opposite of all of those. Quiet and lugubrious and slow. And still here.

16.00

...and they're gone. They are.

And I think there's a slow drip from the basin wastepipe, but I'll give it a while before I yell foul.

Meanwhile, new bathroom! Much like the old bathroom, as it happens, except shiny! new floorboards and new joists beneath, and no rot. No rot is good. No rot is good rot, I believe.

And empty house. Empty house is good house.

Now I shall release the boys from Durance Vile, and go out. Because - well, y'know. Because I've been in all day.

I think it's going to rain, and I don't care.

How dangly is your participle...?

Just heard on Radio 4:

"Walking south on the Millennium Bridge in front of me is Tate Modern..."

I do not think that construction means what you think it means.


In other news, I am bewildered by (old-style) technology. My water is heated by a gas boiler and then stored in a tank (or until the heat dissipates, *grr entropy*). The boiler comes on and off at set times, morning and evening. In order to reconnect my bath without getting all wet, the plumber had me drain the tank at two o'clock. Between then and now (5.30), the boiler has not been on - and yet, the water's warm. Not hot, but definitely warm. How can this be? Residual heat in the drained tank, warming the fresh water as it filled? Or does the pilot-light alone produce enough heat to warm the water noticeably? Or...? *is baffled*

23.08

Aargh. I just had a bath: and (a) the water is taking forever to drain out of the tub; and (b) it is raining in the kitchen below. Urgh. And Simon-the-project-manager is away till Monday. Sigh...