We’re back!
So it’s been a whole two weeks since the last update. My plan for this update was to take a step back and let some other people do work to the house and I’d just keep you updated. Unfortunately it didn’t quite turn out that way.
Unpacking
📦 Unpack-o-meter 📦
We've unpacked 54 boxes out of 67!
Yeah! A total of 0 boxes unpacked this fortnight. Much progress. Very wow.
This doesn’t really tell the whole story though. We unpacked at least two boxes searching for one of those banking card readery things - but then we packed everything back into the boxes once we’d finished. Really we need to get a few more rooms sorted with some storage space and then we can finally put things away.
Roofers
Probably the easiest update. They’ve been delayed by a week due to the weather so no actual roofer-ing has happened yet, but the scaffolding has just gone up for them to start on Monday.
Damp-proofers and the utility room
This is our lesson of the week - If a contractor tells you that they’ll organise something with someone else, it’s worth following up on that and checking with that someone else. In this case the damp-proofer told us that they’d arrange things with our electrician. This didn’t happen. So this week, we’ve had the all the plaster hacked back in the utility room, the underlying stone/brick has been primed, and then we’ve had to leave things in that state for a week ☹
We’ve implemented a time-share scheme for the dishwasher and washing machine for the only remaining water source and drain.
On the other hand, the person hacking all the plaster off didn’t damage the cable going from the electricity meter to the fusebox. That cable is what we need the electrician for. Currently the only protection on that cable is the whole-house fuse. I thought the electrician would recommend that we get some sort of RCD by the meter - between the meter and the consumer-unit-to-be. However, according to the electrician this would mean that whenever there was a fault in the wiring in the house we would probably also trip that RCD, cutting off all power to the house. The solution proposed (by two separate electricians) is to replace the cable with an ARMOURED CABLE - so still no electrical protection apart from the whole-house fuse, but a lot more physical protection 💪
The electrician is also booked for Monday so hopefully things will start moving again at that point.
🔒 First thing on the list 🔑
Speaking of physical protection - What’s the first thing you should do when moving into a new house? According to many people ‘Change the Locks’ is high on that list. This seemed like a good idea, so we ordered a new lock for the front door a few days after moving in. The lock arrived, and being the same make/model as the current lock it was an easy process to install it. Once it was installed it became clear that it wasn’t quite working right. If there was any forward-backward pressure on the locking bolt, the mechanism didn’t disengage smoothly. Because the old lock was the same make/model, it was an easy process to reinstall it…
It’s taken a whole month to get all the back and forth between me, the shop, the manufacturer, and Fedex failing to pick up a package several times, but we’ve finally got the replacement and being the same make/model as the old lock it was an easy process to install it.
🎵 Nozzy gig! 🎵
Woo! One of the biggest contra dance series in the country is London Barndance which has continued to run in a virtual fashion since the lockdowns started. It’s a series that we’ve always wanted to play at, and we finally got invited - just as we were moving out of London. There was a fair amount of setup and organising to be done, but in the end it went really well and everyone seemed to enjoy it. It’s still really weird playing for a load of dancers that you can barely see, but it’s really cool that we can play for people all around the world at once. I know we had some people tuning in from America, and there were definitely people that were dancing together in Minecraft as well.
Adam Hughes (the caller) visited for the duration of the gig. Officially this was travelling for work, so that’s fine…
Ethernet
This took a bit of a break while we needed to make sure nothing happened to our internet during our gig. At the end of the last update we’d finally managed to thread some string through the areas we wanted our cables to end up. Once the spool of cable arrived it was pleasantly simple to pull the cable up from the lounge, through the bedroom, to the top floor bathroom. To get into the office we had to drill our first BIG HOLE IN THE WALL for this house - I think that’s the house equivalent of licking something to claim it as your own.
Now that the cable was in place we need to terminate it. In the office this was quite easy. We can see both sides of the wall and the place we want to cut a hole is hidden behind the bathtub (and probable future stud wall for future shower) - So we drilled a test hole, marked and cut out the rectangle for the backbox, pulled the cable through and terminated it - Nice!
Buoyed by that success we headed back down to the lounge to terminate the other end of the cable. I picked a likely sounding hollow spot next to a socket and started cutting out a hole…
Hmm, this was a bit of an issue. I knew there would be pipes there, but I thought that they would be deeper into the wall. The wood also poses a bit of a problem. It means that I wouldn’t be able to use the plasterboard-clamp style of backbox. Ok, I thought, there’s a bit of wood there - let’s just use a standard metal backbox. Nope! There’s not even enough room for the shallowest box.
Hmm. What to do? I considered shaving the wood back to create enough room, but I didn’t really like the idea. Even if it worked the backbox would only be attached on one side which would be far from ideal. Really what I want would be a super shallow box with a plasterboard-clamp on the left hand side, and just screwholes on the right hand side. A quick browse of screwfix/amazon told me that (surprise, surprise) they don’t exist.
3d-printing to the rescue!
Woop! Obviously not a solution I would use for mains voltage stuff, but for low voltage things I think it’ll work perfectly.
One annoying thing - I keep a selection of small machine nuts and bolts for situations like this. I’ve got M2, M2.5, M3, M4, and M5. Would anyone like to guess the guage of standard electrical bolts? That’s right! M3.5 😠 In this case replacing the bolts with M3 works well enough - the heads are covered by a plate anyway.
We didn’t quite have enough time to finish everything off before writing the newsletter, but it’s nearly there.
Any other business?
The office continues to gradually evolve. We’ve finally got enough office chairs for one each, and Nikki’s got a new monitor and an arm to support them. I’m thinking of replacing my desk with something larger and potentially allows for working while standing.
The Harrow house sale continues to drag on. The latest is that the mortgage provider they buyers were using weren’t happy mortgaging a house next door to their current house for whatever reason. They’re moving on to a new provider, but that new provider requires them to use a different set of solicitors than the ones that they’re currently using. Fortunately all the searches are transferable so we won’t have to wait for all of those to be done again, but really we just want it sorted and finished.
This weekend was another lovely sunny barbeque with friends - It’s so good to be able to see a whole person when talking to them.