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).
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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. 😱
The sustain pedal broke on our upright piano.
Normally the insides of the piano are a terrifying place that only our tuner gets to look at. A scary realm whose mysteries I cannot begin to comprehend.
But I was feeling very brave, so I popped it open, found this troublesome hinge, and bodged a fix. It sounds great.
I feel accomplished.
Instructed a 5 year-old in diagnosing and replacing a blown PSU in her mother’s computer.
Spent the last four days in Lancashire and elsewhere in the North of England, visiting my folks (among other things). Details follow…
Sunday 29th June 2003
Dan’s Mum’s House, Preston
Helped fix my mum’s fence, and enjoyed the challenge of removing a pigeon from her gutter. This stupid bird, it seems, on a collision course for the house (shitting on the window as it
came), struck the roof with sufficient force to kill itself, and then rolled gracefully into the gutter, where it became lodged.
Using a clever combination of metal rods and string, Claire and I were able to lasso it’s foot from one of the upstairs windows and, a few pokes later, lob it’s rotting corpse down to my sister, waiting below.
My dad kindly let me take one of his bikes – Silver Machine – back to Aber with me, which’ll make getting to and from work a lot nicer. Must buy a lock for it.
Got back at about midnight. Claire spent most of the night tied to the bed, which was fun. Enough said.
Unfortunatley my plans for a nice relaxed evening over a pint were delayed somewhat by having to help to fix Claire’s car, first. In a fantastic display of sense she’d left the headlights on on Sunday night, and all through Monday, and so by Tuesday the battery was very, very dead.
So she, Bryn, Kit and I stood in a cold and rainy car park, trying to remove Bryn’s car battery to get Claire’s car going, then switch back to her battery while it’s running so we could charge it with a nice long drive. But no such luck: the considerate engineers at Vauxhall decided that to remove the battery you must either (a) own a spanner with a neck width about the size of a human hair or (b) remove the engine first.
Thankfully I was able to persuade a taxi driver at the nearby rank to drive around with some jump leads and get her going. Suddenly this made things a lot easier.
In brighter news, Bryn got offered a year in industry placement with the National Library of Wales, which means that he, too, will be living in Aberystwyth for the summer.