Or, “about bleedin’ time”.
Time to say goodbye to the house in Dublin. The sale took rather longer than we hoped. Sale agreed in late February, completed yesterday! The market is completely different to the last time we nearly sold it in 2005. I wonder where we would be if we had sold in 2005? Unfortunately for us and the buyers at the time my old company went titsup (as recorded by The Register some months later) about a week after we agreed to sell so we decided to pull out until I was back in gainful employment.
Anyway, it’s gone now!
There’s dirt and filth everywhere, all our stuff still layered in dust despite being hidden under dust sheets. Thank God Jean and the kids are in Ireland as this is really tough.
However Jean is not doing very well – she’s picked up every post-partum infection known to Woman and is really tired and stressed looking after Sophie and Lauren. I’m going back there on Wednesday night to help out and drive her back home. Lauren is aparently doing well – should be a huge difference when I see her over a week on!
The Basement guys are making progress – they’ve stripped the basement and dug out most of the area under the dining room. They’re just getting started with underpinning which involves digging one metre square pits alternately around the perimeter and building up to the foundation level. They are on site having a cup of tea at 7:00 when I am only getting up and by the time I leave at around 9 the place is thronged with workmen all bumping into each other in the hallways. I’ve got two guys with jackhammers in the basement. I’ve got two or three plumbers installing a boiler on the second floor, decomissioning gas and all the other old lead pipework and crap that is strung through the house and rehanging the radiators. Then I’ve got another two electricians completly rewiring the house top to bottom, sorting out cat5 cabling and tv/aerial connections. Hopefully they will be done by the weekend.
Did I mention the cold showers? No heating and no hot water for a week! This is an unusually long wait but purely of my own making. I have specified the most complicated route for the ducting from the boiler which is centre of house and against a party wall. It has to come out the top, wind around the ceiling of the walk-in wardrobe/hot press to the opposite side, then go up through the bathroom above and out through the roof. Cost of ducting alone is £800 but hopefully worth it for a clean installation.
The electrics I am much happier with. The house had about three generations of electrics and a crazy bakelite and barbed wire fuseboard on each floor. Now we will have a bang up-to-date system with the consumer unit in the basement area. The walk-in wardrobe space on the first floor (which I am going to have to settle on a consistent name for) will house the wireless router, network storage and telephone point. Cat5 goes from here to the livingroom, kitchen, basement, bedroom 1 and the new study room on the 2nd floor. Of course I have to terminate the network cabling myself as the electrician can only lay the cable, so it could be a protracted period of trial and error to get it right.
The buliding – or more accurately, demolition – work has begun. Jean, Sophie and Lauren are safely back in Ireland while this is going on but I am faced with a cold shower in the morning. The top-floor bathroom has been stripped and will be divided into a small shower room and a study (with three girls in the house I am going to need a retreat however small!). The builder ceiling has also been stripped and will be vaulted directly upwards to a large velux window.
The rest of the house is being completely rewired – all sockets and switches being replaced, ethernet cable being installed, and new sat/tv sockets being wired.
The cellar has also been emptied and some of the internal walls taken out – I’ll put some more pics up in the next few days.
I’ve just put a bunch of pictures up on the photos section of this site – the most recent thumbnails should be on the left and you can click on them to be taken to the gallery. The pictures currently fall into three categories – family, house and snaps – so you will see some pics of the house as it develops, some more pics of Sophie as she gets bigger and just some other photos that I like.
It’s taken a while to get used to the new camera – just as it did with the old Nikon 5700 – but it’s fun learning about it. It’s a Nikon D50 that I bought for a song (£130 including a kit lens) on ebay a couple of months ago.
We had a visit from Patricia and George yesterday. It was good to see them and to get another perspective on the house. Sophie as usual took about two hours to settle down and stop bouncing off the walls with excitement at having visitors. I kept having to pick her up and put her in the next room to cool down. She loved her present of finger paints and a paint book too, which she played with alongside me while I edited my photos last night.
The house is still the same – we are struggling to get a builder to even provide a quotation never mind agree to do the work so we may need to look further afield. We haven’t agreed on a kitchen style yet, never mind a supplier so no progress there. The living room and first floor bedrooms can be done quickly if we pull the finger out so we may try to make progress with that this week. Bedroom 1 needs to have a fairly horrible gas fire extracted from a nice marble surround. The living room needs to have a totally new fireplace to replace the over large wood burning stove.
