flood 2026 – Dan Q

My piano came home from the hospital

When my house flooded 149 days ago, a lot of things were damaged. The oak floors, for one, were completely wrecked, as the ground floor electrical ring, the skirting boards, one internal one, a few hundred books and small items, and a load of furniture. Since then we’ve lived in a few places – but mostly at the “Chicory House” – while the insurance company has been working on repairing and replacing everything that we’ve lost.

This week, we got back the piano.

Two men move an upright piano across a driveway and through a door, with the help of a small trolley and some boards. — Professional piano movers make this job look easy. But having tried to move a piano before, it’s definitely not.

Our insurance policy is “new for old”, but we own a handful of pieces of furniture whether it’s impractical or impossible to replace them like-for-like and we’ve instead petitioned for restoration. For example: our dining table is a bit of a family heirloom, a mahogany reading room desk formerly from the libraries of the University of Cambridge, adapted by Ruth‘s (carpenter) father into a dining table¹.

Another example turns out to be our upright piano, which turns out to be a bit of a musical oddity: it’s got features, like it’s peculiar gravity-controlled overdampers that, among other characteristics, are pretty distinct to the Edwardian or perhaps inter-war construction techniques that were in vogue at the time².

Post-flood photo of the body of an upright piano alongside a cabinet with a clear tide mark up to about a foot from the ground. — Follow the line of the tide mark fromt he glasses cabinet to the piano and it’s clear that the body of the instrument sat full of water for some time. 😢

In any case: after a piano specialist wrote us a statement explaining that it simply wasn’t possible to “new-for-old” this because they don’t make them like this any more, the insurance company signed-off on us sending it away to what I lovingly called a “piano hospital”, where she’s enjoyed a complete overhaul.

And now, at last, it’s back with us: we could have kept it in storage until we’re ready to move back “home” (there’s still a lot of repair work to be done!), but having it moved twice is cheaper… plus it means we get it back sooner.

The pristine inside of an upright piano. — There was clearly a lot of TLC available at the “piano hospital”: it’s got a whole new set of strings, new felt, and even her internal metalwork has been polished to a shine.

Personally, I’ve found it an enormous psychological relief to have the piano back, because I’ve missed it!

I started teaching myself to play the piano during the second Covid lockdown, looking for something to distract me from my inability to go outdoors and do things, and wanting to try to engage a different part of my brain. I was quickly hooked: I’d never learned any musical instrument before³, and I enjoyed having something I was (and still am!) pretty bad at which I could make slow incremental progress.

And so for several years, most days, I’d play about 10 minutes of piano. Not much: just a little each day usually while my lunch warmed up. But slowly but surely I reached the point that I could tolerate – or even enjoy! – hearing myself play⁴.

And then after the flood… I couldn’t. I’d get up from work to stretch my legs and my fingers would twitch in anticipation of fulfilling a routine that… I just didn’t get to, any more. I tried playing the electric piano at the local library but its headphones were damaged and the action didn’t feel right and… it just wasn’t the same. I wanted our piano back!

And now I’ve got it. And it feels fantastic. It’s a little different – the sustain pedal’s response is a lot better, but more nuanced, and I’m not used to it yet, for example. But it’s still a wonderful thing: like a family member coming home after a long period away.

Also: it feels like a small victory to have something back, following the flood, because the entire insurance/assessment/repair process continues to be so slow.

Our house may still be stuck with no floors and missing walls… but, five months later, the first things to be repaired are coming back to us. Maybe soon we’ll have, I don’t know, a working kitchen or the plumbing re-connected. Here’s hoping!

Footnotes

¹ The transformation of the reading room desk – which once sported integrated reading lights – into a general-purpose table has been done so-effectively that you wouldn’t know to look at it that our largest piece of furniture had ever had another life… unless you lift the secret panel in its centre foot, at which point you’d discover a BS 546 plug still wired-in to it!

² Don’t ask me to enumerate the particular features or how we know: JTA, plus our piano tuner, did the research that ultimately underpinned the argument that you couldn’t possibly acquire a like-for-like replacement for it. I just know how it feels and sounds.

³ I didn’t even play a recorder at school!

⁴ I fully appreciate that I will never be as good a pianist as, say, the average 8-year old who plays for their YouTube channel. I am fine with this. Like my blogging, my piano-playing is, first and foremost, for me and not for anybody else.

F-Day plus 130

A hundred and thirty days since we got flooded out of our home, and remedial works are starting to ramp up. Today an electrician, tracing a fault that’s developed in the wiring, cut a hole through a wall to repair it and threw up so much dust that it’s hard to see anything!

I was nearby, helping a restoration company assess the damage to the ride-on lawnmower that was in the garage and whose motor hasn’t started since (the garage saw some of the deepest water that hit us), when I heard the fire alarm and went to check on them. All is well: we don’t need to add ‘fire’ to the list of disasters befalling our house this year!

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).

F-Day plus 113

It’s been a hundred and thirteen days since the flood that wrecked our house, and we’re told that repair work will start imminently. Like: as soon as next week!

So today I returned to the house to try to disassemble my sit/stand desk. An enormous and heavy thing that was constructed in-situ, it survived the flood without significant damage but is sort of hard-to-move for the purpose of getting it out of the way of the folks who’ll hopefully soon be repairing walls, floors, electrics and the like.

A large, L-shaped office desk with thick motorised metal legs lies on its edge, upright, in a bare concrete-floored home office. — This way up. For now.

Unfortunately it proved just too difficult to disassemble the beast. I’d anticipated that it would be able to be easily separated into two major pieces – the “top”, and the “frame” – but the guy who built in for me¹ made some creative decisions about the placements of the controllers and the motors which has meant that the two now can’t be separated without taking the whole thing apart into a lot of tiny bits.

I’ll speak to the builders when they come. Maybe a floor can be laid elsewhere in the house and then the desk, which I’ve collapsed as small as its little motors will carry it, can be moved onto the newly-constructed floor so that it’s out of the way here.

Close-up of tiny sockets on ribbon cables within the housing of a laptop. — Wowsa, these are some tiny connectors!

So I got started on my other hardware task of the day: attempting to repair Ruth‘s laptop. It’s reporting via LED codes a graphics fault and its screen isn’t coming on, and the most-likely cause it an un-seated signal cable. So I picked up some teeny-tiny screwdrivers (my usual ones all being packed in boxes) and had a go.

But no dice; I’ve reseated the cables and it’s still sad, so I’m guessing it’s an actual issue with the screen. Sigh.

Two for two on hardware failures today. I should go back to writing some software. Fortunately; there’s lots of that that needs my attention too, this weekend!

Footnotes

¹ Who – I suspected at the time and of which I’m now even more-confident – might well have been high when he assembled it. There’s some wacky choices here, plus he’s drilled several holes on the underside that he then didn’t actually use!

Ground White Pepper

There are many things I don’t like about the kitchen in the Chicory House where we’re living medium-term following our house flood.

But I like the fact that the integrated spice rack makes it much easier to see where we perhaps have a very-specific blind spot for “buying a new one where the last one’s still more than half-full”.

F-Day plus 97

It’s been 97 days since our house flooded and we had to evacuate. We’re now living medium-term in a “chicory house” a few minutes drive away, but there’s still plenty of reason for us to return frequently to the disaster site that is our actual house.

Today, for example, JTA and I went to show around some contractors who will eventually, we hope, be able to install new floors, skirting boards, remove and replace a wall, rebuild the kitchen, fix the electrics…

It’s been over three months since we had to move out. With the drying-out complete, it’s finally time to begin planning to start scheduling the start of the repair work that needs doing. What a painfully-slow process!

The day after the flood water receded, I took this photo while we were assessing damage – you can see the tide marks left by the water:

That picture shows part of our piano, which took in a lot of water and was significantly damaged. It’s off at a nice piano hospital right now being repaired, and I miss it much more than I expected.

After playing maybe ten minutes a day almost every day for years, I routinely get up from my desk to stretch my legs or heat up my lunch and my fingers itch to plink-plonk away at it. Of all the hundred inconveniences of our temporary living situation and everything that goes along with it, that’s the one that bites most-frequently. It’s a strange sensation.

But all the builders and the insurance company and everybody else seem confident that they can get us back into our home in the Autumn, and certainly by Christmas, so there’s something to look forward to. A light at the end of the tunnel.

£4,803.40 a Year for Water?

When we picked up the keys to the rental house we’ll be living in while our home is repaired following the flood that forced us to evacuate, I took an initial meter reading then got in touch with super-reputable water company Thames Water to let them know the situation.

A digital water meter showing the value 381641. — The Chicory House’s water meter, found in a cupboard, is so much easier to read than the one at our regular house, which is found down a frequently-flooded manhole on the busy road outside.

Unfortunately, Thames Water had fucked-up¹ and created an account for us already with the wrong information², so by the time I’d reached out to them they were already getting themselves into a pickle.

It turns out that, presumably because of some shortsightedness on the part of their software engineers, their computer systems wouldn’t let them change the information to correct the problem. Nor could they simply delete the account and create a new one³. Instead, the had to close the account they’d erroneously set up such that the start and end date of the contract was our moving-in date… and then set up a new account starting from the day after.

Sigh. Fine! So long as it’s sorted, I didn’t even care. Until, that is, the bill arrived for the one day of the first (incorrectly-created) contract:

A Thames Water bill dated 18 April, for an account being closed '04/09/2026', covering a billing period of 9 April - 9 April, for £13.16. — This looks pretty low for a metered water bill, until you realise that it covers a period of *literally only eleven hours* from us moving in (and taking a meter reading) until the end of that day. And that during most of that time the water was switched-off because a pair of plumbers were installing a new bathroom!

That bill:

is for £13.16.
covers “9 April 2026 through 9 April 2026”, i.e. one day.
- (which means that our estimated annual bill would be £4,803.40 (£13.16 × 365) – about eight times the national average)
states that our account closure was/will be “04/09/2026” – the only date on the letter that’s in “short” date format and which would appear to be 4 September (in UK date format) even though 9 April would make more sense (but would require interpreting it in US date format, which would make no sense).

Let’s see how that breaks down:

Breakdown of the '1 day' bill covering three cubic metres of water at £2.7346 (usage) and £1.4721 (sewerage), plus fixed charges, totalling £13.16. — The rates are standard, albeit a little on the high end: Thames Water need to raise funds right now to fix all of the leaks in their pipes, apparently. What’s odd is the volume of water they claim has been used.

According to this bill, we used three cubic metres of water between collecting the keys (at around 1pm), moving in, and taking a meter reading… and the end of the day. That’s three thousand litres of water.

Is it possible to achieve that level of water usage in the nine hours of billable time that this bill covers? I guess, if you really tried, you could:

completely fill and then drain our 100-litre bathtub, three times an hour, taking a five-and-a-half minute bath in each before draining it again, for the rest of the day⁴; or
run the kitchen tap – the highest-pressure tap in the house – continuously for six hours and forty minutes; or
repeatedly flush all three toilets, on “full-flush” mode, once every 79 seconds until midnight⁵, for example.

Dan, a white man with a blue ponytail, wearing a green t-shirt, watches a stopwatch timer on his phone while filling a measuring jug from the kitchen sink's tap. — Some science was involved in the writing of this blog post.

Obviously this is all ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous.

But then again, so is this bill, which claims that three adults spent 11 hours in a house and somehow used the amount of water that’s the recommended amount to drink in a day… by 1,500 adults. Despite the water being shut-off to install a shower and toilet for some of that time.

But then again, so is Thames Water’s computer system, which disallows the correction of mistakes even by their own staff and instead requires the creation of one-day contracts. And also can’t decide which country’s date format to use. And, possibly, doesn’t allow them to obey data protection laws.

The whole thing’s ridiculous. Which I’ll be letting Thames Water know. Let’s see if they agree.

Footnotes

¹ This may be no surprise to anybody who’s ever dealt with Thames Water before, or who follows the news about their seemingly endless inability to keep clean water in its pipes and raw sewage out of our rivers, for example, while taking out loans in order to pay bonuses to their self-back-patting executives.

² They used information provided to them by the estate agent and failed to connect it to the information they already had for us… which thanks to quirks of their information systems resulted in bigger problems down the line. Amusingly – and for a change! – none of the problems were related to my unusual name, this time around.

³ Curiously, these initial mistakes on the part of Thames Water left them processing personal information about me – an email address – that I’d never given to them, and allegedly unable to delete or correct it for six months after being asked to. This is the kind of thing that normally gives me an excuse for a field day of DPA2018-related letter writing, but this time around I’ve been too busy dealing with the bigger problems they’ve created to have a chance to stop and think about that: that’s how much of a mess they’ve made.

⁴ It’s only barely possible to repeatedly fill the bath this quickly, you need to use both hot and cold water: the cold inlet alone doesn’t have the pressure to fill it fast enough, but the hot water tank has its own separate inlet which makes all the difference. Also, a cold bath would suck, even if you’re only allowed five minutes in it before it’s time to drain the tub and start filling it again.

⁵ I once had a really rough night after a particularly dodgy curry, but I’ve never needed to be flushing a toilet twice a minute for eleven hours.

Chicory Battlestation

Man, I have missed having a battlestation to work at these last few months. It’s nice to sit at one again, even if it’s only a ‘chicory battlestation’.

Moving the Internet

The “regular” house’s Internet connection finally switched-off last night, so I zipped around this morning and moved my NAS across to the Chicory House.

Dan, a white man with a ponytail and a goatee beard, carries a large black cube-shaped computer down a staircase. — This was a challenging selfie to take.

Unfortunately, Gigaclear haven’t yet managed to fulfil their promise to reassign our static IP address to our new line, so this was swiftly followed by some DNS reconfiguration, sigh!

The Commute (Chicory House Edition)

My “commute” since moving to the Chicory House isn’t much longer than it is at our regular home, but it does involve going outside. Want to see?

Chicory House, Real Coffee, Flooded Keyboard

As if I hadn’t suffered enough “flood damage” this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup – hour the first time in months! – in our rental… by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱

Chicory, Coffee, and Code

Now that we’ve finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment… with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss!

Chicory Keys

Towards the end of last week we picked up the keys to the Chicory House.¹ We’ve now officially moved in to the place we’ll be calling home for the next six months or so, while we wait for our Actual House to be repaired following our catastrophic flood in February.²

As part of my efforts to travel light, I use a pretty small wallet – a lump of carbon fibre about the size of a deck of cards³ that contains my ID, bank cards, and – in pocket at the back – my essential keys. Typically that’s my front door key and my bike lock key.

Minimalist carbon fibre wallet, balanced on two fingertips, with parts of a Halifax Mastercard credit card showing from behind an elasticated band. — The keys tuck in around the back, but there’s a “hook” on the end to which additional keys can be ringed. Sometimes I hook up a second-factor hardware token to it when I’m travelling with one.

And so when I received my front door key to the Chicory House, I had to decide: where does this key belong?

The obvious answer would have been to remove the front door key for my actual home from its special place within my wallet and replace it with the Chicory House’s front door key. That’s the one I’ll need most-often for the foreseeable future, right? My regular front door key can move to the supplementary hook, on a ring, and/or be removed entirely and taken with me only when I need to visit my uninhabitable home.

But that’s not what I did.

Reverse side of my wallet showing my regular house key folded-out from its special spot, and the Chicory House key attached to the hook. — I didn’t even think about what I was doing until I noticed, afterwards, that I’d chosen to put the Chicory House key on the “supplementary keys” hook rather than in the “primary keys” spot.

This made sense as an instinctive move: it’s where I’d clip on the key to any of the half-dozen or so AirBnBs I’ve lived in for the last couple of months, after all! But for a house I’m going to live in for half a year or more it doesn’t seem so rational.

But I haven’t put it back. I think I’m keeping it this way. My regular key gets to keep its special spot because it represents the lost status quo and the aspiration to return. Sure, it’s less-practical for me to keep it there, but its position is symbolic, not sensible.

Swapping the two over would feel like giving in: like caving to the inevitability of us being out of our home for an extended period. Keeping the key where it is means that every time I put my hand in my pocket I’m reminded that the current arrangement is temporary; things will go back to normal. And that’s nice.⁴

Footnotes

¹ The house isn’t actually called that, of course. That’s our nickname for it, on account of it being a substitute for the real thing.

² The flood was exactly two months ago today, which makes today “F-Day plus 60”. We’ve spent most of the intervening time hopping from AirBnB to AirBnB.

³ As somebody who often carries a deck of cards, this is a pretty-convenient size to me!

⁴ That said, the Chicory House is way better than most of the AirBnB’s we’ve been living in, and I’m especially loving being able to sleep on my own familiar mattress again! While I wouldn’t want to live here forever like I’d be happy to in the place we’ve called home since 2020, it’ll certainly suffice for the immediate future. A stepping-stone back towards the lives we’d built before.

Unpacked Kitchen

Today’s mission in what we’re calling the Chicory House – our home while our actual house gets repaired – was to unpack the kitchen. I think it’s looking pretty good!

A moderately tidy kitchen with faux-marble countertops, under free on which an open large cardboard box can be seen. In the distance, a conservatory contains a small dining table cluttered with computer equipment. — The cardboard box you can see contains pans we brought with us that turn out to be incompatible with the induction hobs at the Chicory House, boo!

Next weekend’s mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn’t the conservatory dining table. 😬