We bought a house. It needed some work. I thought I'd write about it.
Wednesday 24th March
[excuse the hiatus, I might post some highlights from last week]
Wednesday. The day when the plumbers come to fit the under-floor heating. The electrician is moving on to upstairs first fix, which includes ground floor lighting. He’s re-wired all of downstairs and the only two plugs working are by the electricity meter. These are essential to the operation of his power tools and the kettle.
All of a sudden the man turns up to collect the pile of detritus outside, which includes all the formica and chipboard you could ever want. We frantically empty the ‘fitted’ wardrobes from upstairs and hoik it all into the lorry, keeping anything I can BURN. Because operating the internet doesn’t require much heavy lifting I do something bad to my back which slows me down to the speed of a pensioner for the rest of the day.
Whilst this is happening the under-floor heating delivery arrives with hundreds of metres of very thick 17mm pipe, the manifold and the paraphenalia. We hurriedly unpack this and look for the designs and instructions from our family-friend supplier. What we find is three scrappy pages of A4, with spirals allegedly showing the layout of the pipes and a few numbers, but no titles anywhere. It looks exactly like the kind of homework you dash off on the bus when you have to hand it in first lesson. 2/10 see me.
We discuss the positioning of the pipes and discover from John that he only planned to notch the joists on one side, hence the doubling up on one side of each room. We knew they were too shallow to notch without beefing up, but something got lost in the translation. In addition to this, the coils are far longer than 50m. They’re getting on for 100m which means the bits toward the end will be cold. Mrs Badger decides to redesign it with two coils per room and some kind of splitter so we don’t need extra valves.
The plumbers finally arrive after their emergency callout (Full English?) and we relate the UFH plans to them carefully by babbling at them from three directions at once. In the middle of all this the neighbour with the boundary dispute decides this is a good time to get a solicitor’s letter out from 1988 requesting someone recognises the boundary next time the house is sold or the fence is repaired. And also, by the way, I just got round to making a public comment on your planning application. Thanks.
So at this point a visit from the Jehova’s Witnesses probably would be less welcome than usual. They’re sneaky though. The first rule of Jehova’s Witnesses is you don’t talk about Jehova’s Witnesses. “We’re having a meeting in the area and we’d love you to come along.” Mrs Badger being the polite new neighbour was all friendly and pleasant with the new friendly visitors, if slightly impatient. Eventually they drop the J-bomb - “Jesus died for our sins” and it’s game over for them.
After some grumbling the plumbers tell us we can’t fit “splitters” or “T-connectors” to make two coils from one valve because the flow won’t be even and they might even “cross-circulate”. Fair point, they’re the experts. They send us off into plumbing supply land (Horspath Industrial Estate) to find an extra three valves for the end of our manifold. When we get there we discover the system we have is unbranded, nobody sells under-floor heating in anything but kits and it’s all at least two weeks before it would arrive anyway. Bollocks.
Fed up of the sideways knowing looks between plumbing suppliers behind their trade counters, we call the original supplier and ask him to send more valves.
The rest of the day consists of me making trips back to the same plumbing suppliers, this time without the wife. They somehow treat me differently when she’s not there, but I still get the “we could tell you anything mate and you’d believe it” looks.
I had prepared a time capsule for putting under the floor. Today conspired against me.
Found today:
Never get things supplied by favour because you can’t shout at them when it doesn’t work.
Under-floor-heating only comes in complete kits for a reason
We have nice floorboards upstairs.
