Three months on, three months of huge humming dehumidifier, three months almost to the day of our New Year burst pipe disaster, the builders arrived to begin replacing ceilings, ripping up floors and fitting new units.
We had to wait for the walls to dry out you see, hence the three month wait. For the last three months we have had to listen to the drone of a massive blue machine sucking the water from the air twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and according to the timer it has now been running for 1,493 hours even though sometimes, mainly meal times, we’ve turned it off for a few minutes in a fruitless attempt to keep our sanity.
Not quite as bad as the continuous ringing of bells, but I am beginning to feel a little like Quasimodo as well as looking like him.
Still, I’ve never been one to despair and today the builders came and the work began. It would all be over in a couple of weeks.
Until they began lifting the kitchen floor that is.
Underneath the laminate floor they found ceramic tiles, underneath the ceramic tiles they found a layer of 22mm chipboard, underneath the chipboard they found the original floorboards. The boards were soaking wet and moulding, the water had penetrated the top layer of flooring, permeated through the grouting of the tiles, soaked into the chipboard turning it to soggy dust and settled on the surface of the floorboards where it had lay festering like a murky layer of primordial ooze.
The smell of damp hit me like a dustbin full of toadstools. How did I know it was full? Well, there wasn’t mush-room inside.
No, not even Lonnie Donegan’s immortal line from ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ could manage to bring a smile to my lips.
It is all going to have to be replaced but before that can be done the floorboards need to be dried out and that means…
CLICK – huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum- huuum…
The Dehumidifier is back on and the big blue hummer is back.
Sanctuary! Sanctuary! I must have sanctuary!
Neil Fishwick commented on Facebook:
ReplyDeleteNeil wrote "Almost unbelievable"