This weekend it has been easy to feel sorry for myself, even without the help of my lovely hormones.
We are in the process of trying to tidy up after the week’s plastering, and to decide what else we want to tackle, if anything. So we were crammed into the sitting room with an extra chair and Steve’s exciting media PC that I’m not sure of how to operate. Joel came in on Friday morning and told me that his chair was all wet. Water dripping from the ceiling – from the second-least accessible bit of the loft. We dismissed it as rainfall from a new direction, and didn’t worry too hard, but when it was still dripping at Joel’s bedtime, Steve investigated & found the pipes were indeed leaking. We have homeserve emergency plumbing cover, so we called them and they sent an engineer round the following day. He turned up over an hour late (given a window of 5 hours to hit, he managed to miss it), and refused to go into the loft on health & safety grounds. I’ll give him that the loft was inaccessible, especially given his height & girth. What really narked me was his statement that “you won’t get any other engineer to get up there, either.” After Steve spoke to them (I got too ranty) it turns out their policy in this instance is “fuck you”, swiftly followed by “you’re on your own”.
To rewind slightly, earlier in the day, while Steve was waiting in for said engineer, I took the kids on a trip to the office to sort out our cardboard recycling mountain. When I saw that there was water dripping from the ceiling there, too, I honestly thought I was hallucinating. The landlord arranged for me to meet up with a plumber at 4pm. I got M&D to look after L&J and returned to the office to wait for said plumber who not only didn’t show, he had turned his phone off and was presumably in the process of getting pissed in the lovely sunshine which was beating down. While I was removing soggy crumbling ceiling tiles, and re-arranging buckets, and NOT spending a Saturday afternoon down the park with my children. Turns out, Martin in the flat above found water pouring down his walls later in the afternoon from the flat above, so at least we know the source of that one, and hopefully it’ll be sorted by the time we want to run a business from those premises on Tuesday.
So, this morning, instead of taking my Catholic children to Easter mass, Steve & I spent a happy hour or so putting planks in the loft so that the next plumber we get to suck his teeth in the general direction of our pipes has less of an excuse to not fix them.
I’ve finally managed to chill, but it took an afternoon of sun, food & chocolate at my Mum’s house to do it!