builder – Dan Q

F-Day plus 214

It’s been 214 days since I had to evacuate my house following a flood, and repair work is (intermittently) underway. And there are so-many moving pieces to this dance that… it’s little wonder that people are getting confused.

Like:

Our insurance company appointed a relocations specialist to handle our temporary accommodation needs (moving van, sourcing and paying for rental properties, etc.).

Mostly what that means right now is that the relocations specialist pays our rent. They send money to our letting agent. Who send the money to our landlord. The relocations specialist reclaims this cost from our insurance company. And, I would assume, everybody takes a cut along the way.

The building contractors, also paid for by the insurance company, are confident they can have our house ready to move back into in November (this is hard to believe to look at it, but they assure us that once they can get the remaining materials, everything will pick up speed). The building contractors reported their timeline back to the insurance company.

Then the insurance company picked a date a little after that, and asked the relocations specialist to cut off our temporary accommodation from that date.

Then the relocations specialist emailed our letting agent, copying me in, to give notice that we’ll be moving out of our “Chicory House“.

This clearly confused the letting agent. The letting agent seem to have assumed that the relocations specialist is somehow representing the landlord, when in actual fact they represent us, the tenants. Per relatively new UK legislation, the landlord can’t simply give us notice and evict us without following certain complex legal processes and giving 4+ months notice. But we, the tenants, can just give two months notice and bounce. So the letting agent have told the relocations specialist that they can’t ask us to move out (of the house that they’re paying for, on our behalf). 🤣

The bottom line is that I’m now deep in the CCs of an email exchange between the company who pays my rent… and the company they pay it to… about whether they can stop paying my rent for me… when I move back into my own house. 🙄

One email from me would probably clear up the confusion. But I think that this time… I’ll let then work it out for themselves.

F-Day plus 204 (no content??)

HTTP status code 204 means “no content”. No update. Nothing to tell you.

Which I’m reminded of as I write about progress on our house repairs following the flood that swept through our home on Friday 13 February… 204 days ago. Because that’s how the summer’s repairs have felt: No updates. Nothing to say.

It was already pretty jarring to return from an epic holiday and get back into work-mode. But it was doubly-regrettable to discover that the various tradespeople who’d been given access to our house in our absence had done… pretty-much nothing.

No work done. And also: no update messages. Everything had just… stopped.

A floor-cleaning machine is pushed across a glistening limestone floor. — I tell a lie: the restoration of the kitchen floor – a one-day task that didn’t block any of the other next-tasks on the list – happened at the start of August.

So we gathered the builders and the loss adjuster and demanded an update. Sometimes you just have to step up and say “hey, what the fuck guys, are we ever gonna get to move back into our house?”

It turns out there’d been a few blockers. The contractor who’d been sourced to lay the new underfloor screed in the living room and library had not turned up. The new tiles that would replace the flooring across the ground floor were still being quarried. The electrical work had complexities that had caused it to overrun be split into two visits, separated by the electricians’ other contracts.

A dilapidated living room with damaged lower walls and missing flooring, filled with tools and bags of rubbish. — When I visited this week the living room’s condition was identical to how it had looked six weeks prior. Sigh.

Which is frustrating, of course, but it was definitely exacerbated by the lack of communication.

Anyway: our meeting with the various parties led to a new timeline, and it optimistically proposes that we might be able to move back into our home as soon as November… so, F-Day plus 262 through 291, I guess? Here’s hoping. (Obviously any update will make it into my now long-running series of posts about our experience of getting flooded-out.)

We’re really keen to be back home by Christmas. The Chicory House is okay as temporary accommodation but there are plenty of things I dislike about it, and I’m ready to move back into our actual house now, thanks.

F-Day plus 125

125 days since our house flooded, and the damaged furniture fittings, floors, underfloors, and now inner walls have been torn out.

Over a third of a year since we had to move out, I’m optimistic that perhaps, at last, reconstruction work is almost ready to begin.

It’s a long, slow process. And there’s clearly a way to go. But it’s good to see progress happening.

F-Day plus 115

115 days since our house flood, the beginnings of the very first of the remedial works are taking place. Today, builders will drill through and lift part of a cracked poured-concrete foundation to work out what’s beneath and whether it’s stable enough to lay a new floor on top of. Also, somebody’s coming around to quote for the laying of new floors (and we’ll see if their numbers line up with those estimated by the insurance company).

Building a Playframe (Timelapse Video)

This week, with help from Robin and JTA, I built a TropicTemple Tall XXL climbing frame in the garden of our new house. Manufacturer Fatmoose provided us with a pallet-load of lumber and a sack of accessories, delivered to our driveway, based on a design Ruth and I customised using their website, and we assembled it on-site over the course of around three days. The video above is a timelapse taken from our kitchen window using a tablet I set up for that purpose, interspersed with close-up snippets of us assembling it and of the children testing it out.

Playframe in VR — You can explore the play equipment in VR, if you like.

I’ve also built a Virtual Tour so you can explore the playframe using your computer, phone, or VR headset. Take a look!

The video is also available via:

The Crack

There’s a man in the house. He carries a hammer in his toolbelt and shows the crack of his bottom over the top of his worn workwear even when he’s not crawling around on the floorboards. He’s been sent to repair a few bits of Earth, our perpetually-falling-apart house, and to quote for a handful of further improvements that he’s hoping to persuade the landlord to let him install after we’ve gone.

He repairs the wobbly floorboard in my office while I try to get on with some work. The floorboard sinks considerably when it’s walked over, and feels like it might at any moment send me plummeting down into Paul‘s room. It’ll be good to have it repaired, even if this does occur only weeks before we are due to move out.

I’m listening to a Radio 4 program about disenchantment with contemporary financial establishments and cyber-trading and the recent growth of interest in gold trading as a “safety net”. A panellist says that for the first time in recorded history, the majority of gold is held by private investors, rather than by central banks. At some point, another panellist describes the expertise required by financial traders and a post-capitalist economy as being esoteric.

The builder pulls his head out from below the floorboards and speaks. “Ee-sow-terick?” he says, “I don’t even know what that means!”

“That’s subtly ironic, then!” I reply, not sure whether or not he’s being serious.

The builder makes a grunting sound that I interpret as being a derivation on the word “Huh?”

“Something esoteric is… something known only to a few; to an elite minority, perhaps,” I begin. “Like the word itself, it turns out,” I add, after a pause.

The builder grunts again; a sound that expresses his disinterest even more thoroughly than did his last utterance. He rolls the carpet back to where it belongs, and – by way of demonstration – jumps up and down. Somehow, in the last two minutes, he’s managed to repair the fragile floorboard. I didn’t even see what he was doing: one moment there was a hole in the floor, and now… everything was fine. I’d have been no less surprised if he’d produced the Nine of Spades from behind my ear. Perhaps I was merely distracted by the radio, but I’ve got no idea how he did it.