Full House

Woke up this morning and saw grey skies once again... and there I was, fooling myself that the recent good weather was here to stay. Oh well! Honestly, looking at the grey-ness of it all starts my day off badly. I feel lethargic and fed up. On the contrary, when I woke up to blue skies last week, I felt so much better - SAD strikes again I guess hehehe!

Anyway, my life this week has been fairly uneventful except for one thing. My house. Now those of you who own/live in their own house (ie not mum's and dad's) will no doubt understand and sympathise with me over what I am going to say: why is it that you can spend weeks, even months, not even thinking about your house/flat etc and then everything happens to it at once?

In the past week or so we've had:

1. a blocked drain, which resulted in my nieghbour (with whom we share the drain) having overflowing drainage in his garage (yuk!). He tried to fix it but couldn't and left me to stand guard over the open drainage hole in front of my gate while he went to find a drain-fixer or whatever you call them. For an hour. In the freezing cold. While I had a bout of the 'flu. After this blessed hour, when I no longer had feeling in my extremities, I said "To hell with it", removed his tools and went inside to make a cup of coffee, hoping no human or animal would fall into the hole in the meantime. Some 10 minutes later my neighbour came back with the news that he couldn't find anyone to help. However, the next morning, he did get someone who did fix it, bless him. At a cost of course, but hey, it was worth it to be able to use the loo again.

2. last summer, we put up a trellis to stop one of our cats jumping over to the other neighbour's roof and being eaten by their big dog (lovely animal but she can't stand cats). Halliha li after a while, the cat realised that he could squeeze himself through the trellis holes anyway, which recently ended up in an excrutiatingly embarrassing situation featuring my cat, their dog, me in my slippers, the neighbours and a broken flowerpot - but that's another story. Anyway, after the last bout of hurricane-like winds that we had, the hubby found 90% of the trellis smashed and lying on the floor of the roof. Great, now we have to spend even more money to get something sturdier by next summer.


3. also , part of the top of the water tank flew away, which means that we had to buy another one which will be delivered next week. It also resulted in an overflow of water gushing into the roof, shaft and road late last night, which I only realised after a while when I heard dripping water from the upstairs bathroom window. The hubby managed somehow to fix it temporarily by climbing up there with a torch at 10 pm. Can't wait for that water bill!

4. I've decided i need a new bathroom as (1) my loo doesn't work anymore and I'm fed up of rushing upstairs like a maniac everytime I need to spend a penny and (2) the old bath is getting rusty - eeeeuuoow! So we went round some bathroom places and visited the bathrooms fair and we found a pretty good deal for a nice, simple bathroom. Please note that the words 'a pretty good deal' does not mean that it was cheap but that it was the cheapest we found of stuff we liked, as we were getting incredibly extorbitant quotes from some places and it would have actually been more worth it to build the damn thing ourselves. Anyway, we obviously need a plumber/tiler, so we got a quote (and are waiting for another one). Geez, I really missed my calling in life - I should've sooooooo become a plumber. I nearly fainted in shock when I got the quote. And apparently, it's NORMAL! I might have to take out a loan to pay it off...

When you are looking around for your own place to live (and Maltagirl, I'm looking at you pupa!), they don't tell you these things... they don't tell you about drains and water seepage and pipes that have to be broken and gotten rid of and, even more annoyingly, people who ring your bell at some odd hour in the morning on Sunday and ask you to sponsor them for some reason or other...

Maybe I should write a manual - 'Things you wanted to know about having your own place, but were afraid to ask'!