Set backs.

3 years ago, after dinner one evening, I got a phone call. J & T who do checks on our house while we are in the UK, rang with bad news. Our water meter isolation tap had failed after a freeze and water had flooded the downstairs.

That was February and when we arrived at Easter they had done a good job of drying out the ground floor. Luckily, we have a small unused cellar and water had gone down there meaning the living area had only ever been an inch deep at most.
The bulk of our furniture was saved and apart from some peeling paint above the skirting board, there were no signs of damage. The doors still fitted and on the surface, everything looked OK. By then, even the cellar had dried out.
The way the house is set out, entering into the kitchen and then three steps down into the living room and hall with concrete tiled floors, then at the end a storeroom with the cellar under, and a bedroom with laminate floor which seemed to have escaped, we considered ourselves lucky.
Lesson learned, we now have extra lagging and our last holiday of the year in October, the water meter is removed and house isolated from the mains.

<< The bedroom as we had it.


That was 2012 so, moving on, last Easter we noticed that the laminate just inside the bedroom felt a bit spongy underneath. I decided that the floor wasn't concrete like the rest of the ground floor, as we had thought, but possibly a mud floor with the laminate on top. A fairly common trick when renovating to sell on. It was put on the list of jobs to do and left at that, a planned lifting and sorting when we had time.

Moving on again, to last month, and we arrived for our planned three week summer break, plenty of sightseeing on the cards and, because of the heat, just a few finishing off jobs. The first thing that hit us entering the house was a pretty funky smell.

This was traced to the bedroom. Now I'm no expert, but, this was deduced as on opening the bedroom door, the smell hit you in the face like a tennis racket.
Plans for a relaxing summer holiday changed before even getting the kettle on.

So, we made up the bed upstairs and set about dismantling the downstairs bedroom furniture.
A small hot tip here: When choosing furniture, try and buy stuff that can fit through the door and doesn't need building in the room. That way if you need to get it out, for instance, because the room smells of rotting wood, it saves time and effort.

<< Bedroom at the moment

You can see from these photos that the ceiling has been changed to do away with the T&G which was a haven for those creepy crawlies.

Up came the laminate followed by spongy chipboard followed by the original floorboards which were laid straight on the mud floor. Sounds easy but the chipboard and wooden boards were so far gone they virtually crumbled to dust when being lifted.

It's not all bad news and I always like to balance the bad with some good. Because of the way the flooring crumbled and my desire to remove every last piece of rot, I just kept shovelling and by accident, the new concrete floor will be a couple of inches lower than the original, just enough to have a ceiling fan over the bed which won't take my head off. It was the lowest ceiling downstairs but is now going to be a little less claustrophobic in there.

At the moment there is no concrete floor as it was deemed a good idea to leave it through the heat of summer to fully dry out. Our builder friend will have a floor down for the next visit in October so, that's that week sorted. Buying in insulation and laminate and scrabbling around on hands and knees for a couple of days.

That's enough for now even though I titled this 'Set backs' plural. I'll not even mention what's been found with the electrics at this time. That's another head banger.