I had a couple of big house projects in mind at the start of the year, and for various reasons both got delayed. And that has meant that suddenly, both happened at the same time. This was really not the plan.
To be fair, the shower in our en-suite bathroom mostly stopped working reliably back before the pandemic started. I could have organised something a bit sooner. But it’s not all that easy to find a plumber, somehow. Then you have to get one to actually show up when they say they will – the first one said “I’ll get back to you with a quote” and ghosted us.
In the meantime, all of our toilets started to only refill at a trickle, the bath shower started to gently leak and cause bubbling paint and plaster around the screen, the boiler started to leak, and a few other things made their way onto the list.
Long story short, we finally got plumbers to come in on November 14th. All went well, they fixed and fitted everything in three days. We now have a gloriously large, working shower in the en-suite, toilets that refill in rapid time, and a boiler that no longer leaks.
But. I decided to go for the infrared heaters instead of the (rusting) towel rails, and to replace the bathroom extractor fan with a heat exchanger unit. That meant the plumbers could take out the existing towel rails, but an electrician would need to fix the new panels and change out the fan. No worries, the plumbers worked with an electrician, and he would come in the following Monday to put the heaters up.
Except he decided he couldn’t do it. Too old, couldn’t do the going up in the roof stuff, didn’t have a long enough ladder for the new heat exchanger. Which, honestly, fine. I’d rather someone just fronted up and said that. But that means we’ve had no heat in the bathrooms for 2 weeks now, and it’s not getting warmer. Fingers crossed there’s a different electrician coming tomorrow. Let’s hope he can do what he thinks he can! It did give us some time to paint the bathroom wall at least.
The other project was adding a battery to the solar panels. The price of electricity has now gone up far enough that it makes no sense to export power and not use every last bit that we can from what we generate. So back in March I reached out to Solar KW who fitted our panels, and we got a quote for adding a battery. I was all set to pay the deposit, when they came back and said “we can’t get hold of batteries and we’re flat out. Can’t guarantee anything before December. Talk to us in September”. So I did.
Of course, the price had increased a little by then. But they’d got some extra hands, and managed to get some batteries. So I finally got an email saying “we’re all go and your battery will be delivered to you on 23rd November”. Which is great. Their new electrician moved a socket on Thursday evening, attached the battery to the wall on Saturday (which apparently needed the help of his teenage son to lift the thing), and is coming back on Tuesday to fully connect everything.
So we’re going to have revolving electricians in the early part of this week. Let’s hope that by Wednesday I can post “And they’re done!”…
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