Apres moi, le deluge
Jul. 3rd, 2010 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceHad a bath last night, and, um. Probably I shouldn't.
I did pack a towel around what I think is the leaking joint beforehand, hoping that would just sop up the leakage; but afterwards - well, the towel was sodden and there was still dripping into the kitchen below.
I am not so much sighing as sobbing. It's such a shame: I was loving my new bathroom floor, and full of good resolutions about sorting the house out and making it a nicer place to live, room by room. And now I'm back to waiting in for plumbers, and anxious that all the floor might have to come up again (if the joint is beyond fixing and the pipe needs replacing, which is ancient and leaden and long), and there is a thin wicked voice in my head that I am not listening to at all, oh no.
And I ought to be working, and I'm not; and I broke my reading-glasses, but I told you that already; and ach fuckit, and like that. And if the plumber doesn't come in the next fifty-seven minutes I have to start making phone-calls, and we all know how much I love that.
Let's talk about something else. You know how great mediaeval gates have a little person-sized wicket gate cut into them to let people come and go (think college, abbey, like that). That wicket gate [I keep typing 'wicked'] always stands six or eight inches or so above ground-level, not to cut into the frame of the great gate. Structural integrity, and so forth. So you have to step over this beam of wood-and-iron as you pass through. Fine: but what do you call that? If it were overhead, it could be a lintel; as it's underfoot, I don't know what the word is. It's not a step, because ground level is necessarily the same on both sides or the great gate wouldn't open. There must be a word, surely? This is mediaeval architecture; there's a word for everything...
[ETA: doorsill! Yay![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bugshaw!]
I did pack a towel around what I think is the leaking joint beforehand, hoping that would just sop up the leakage; but afterwards - well, the towel was sodden and there was still dripping into the kitchen below.
I am not so much sighing as sobbing. It's such a shame: I was loving my new bathroom floor, and full of good resolutions about sorting the house out and making it a nicer place to live, room by room. And now I'm back to waiting in for plumbers, and anxious that all the floor might have to come up again (if the joint is beyond fixing and the pipe needs replacing, which is ancient and leaden and long), and there is a thin wicked voice in my head that I am not listening to at all, oh no.
And I ought to be working, and I'm not; and I broke my reading-glasses, but I told you that already; and ach fuckit, and like that. And if the plumber doesn't come in the next fifty-seven minutes I have to start making phone-calls, and we all know how much I love that.
Let's talk about something else. You know how great mediaeval gates have a little person-sized wicket gate cut into them to let people come and go (think college, abbey, like that). That wicket gate [I keep typing 'wicked'] always stands six or eight inches or so above ground-level, not to cut into the frame of the great gate. Structural integrity, and so forth. So you have to step over this beam of wood-and-iron as you pass through. Fine: but what do you call that? If it were overhead, it could be a lintel; as it's underfoot, I don't know what the word is. It's not a step, because ground level is necessarily the same on both sides or the great gate wouldn't open. There must be a word, surely? This is mediaeval architecture; there's a word for everything...
[ETA: doorsill! Yay
bugshaw!]