Confusing Bath Taps
This video shows my bath taps.
I thought it was just me, but then my lady who does finds them just as confusing.
i suspect Jerry, picked them up cheap in a car boot sale. The bath is bad too as getting in and out isn’t easy.
The Ways of Cowboy Builders
I’ve always found that the deeper I probe this house the more I find terrible examples of Jerry’s handiwork. I was talking at lunchtime, with the builder working on the house opposite and I happened to mention that there were no manuals for any of the appliances. He thought that typical, as if you can’t find where anything was bought, you can’t get back at him. I suppose it could almost mean that a lot of things fell of the back of a lorry. It also might mean, why we couldn’t find the serial number on the dish washer at first. I have now.
Never Buy A House That’s Had Tenants In it!
When I bought my house about eighteen months ago, I liked it. I also got a good discount as it needed some work, as the tenants who’d occupied it on behalf of the previous owner hadn’t looked after it.
I still like it, but the faults in the various systems are a complete pain in the neck.
The cooker put in by the previous owner is totally unsuitable.
An Unsuitable Cooker
In common with every other appliance, there are no instruction manuals, but the biggest problem is that it is too big and stops the doors of the kitchen cupboards opening properly. It’s also a gas cooker, which I hate and the sooner, I can get rid of it and fit a proper electric cooker the better. To be fair to Baumatic, they did at least send me a manual, but that doesn’t help with its unsuitability.
The dishwasher has been wrecked and although it is a good make and I have the knowledge to make it work, I have decided that the best option is to get a new one, as all the baskets and shelves are broken and to get everything clean, you need to wash half the glasses and plates by hand afterwards.
But my biggest moan with the house is the underfloor heating system. When nPower fitted the new meter, they advised me to service the boiler which I did. It also needed a new control system, as the previous owner or the tenants had rewired things themselves.
It now works very intermittently, with the result the house is either stone cold or frighteningly hot. In cold weather, I have to ratchet up the controls and switch the boiler off and on to get any heat.
At least I’ve got hot water, although for the last few days the showers haven’t worked. I thought today, I’d have a bath, and I did, but then the water didn’t run out. Although to be fair it did eventually.
I can’t wait to sell my house in Suffolk, so I can get someone in to fix it all here properly.
I lost count of the number of times, I’ve phoned plumbers and they’ve said they’ll come and haven’t. But then there isn’t much work about!
I do have one worry about the heating and that is the problem might be that the house wasn’t very well insulated by Gerry the builder. So is heating the house, is a bit like pushing water uphill?
Roll on the spring, when I can switch it off.
Another Of Jerry’s Horrors
This picture shows some of his handiwork being removed from the cupboard in my bedroom.
A Shelf By Jerry
If you think that was bad, just look at this hole he made in the floor of the cupboard to access the shower.
Pipe Access By Jerry
It’s all gone now and hopefully when the new wardrobe inserts come from IKEA, his handiwork will be buried for ever.
But Jerry seems to keep popping up in some very unexpected places.
How Not To Put Up A Towel Rail
Jerry was, and hopefully now isn’t a very bad builder. I am reorganising my spare bathroom, so I’ve taken down his disgusting wooden fittings, the like of which I’ve never seen anything so bad and putting up quality Miller ones from my previous home.
My Towel Rail and Hooks and Jerry’s Holes
Note the holes drilled everywhere, where he made so many mistakes. I can count eight holes and three he’s crudely filled and that doesn’t count the three I reused.
Does anybody have a good way to fill holes in tiles?
Good Riddance To The Sixty Watt Light Bulb!
People have a lot of misplaced love for the old sixty watt light-bulb, as this story on the BBC shows.
It doesn’t bother me, as I won’t have an incandescent bulb in the house because of the safety risk, when they fail. An A & E doctor once told me, that they’d had several people come into hospital after falls, where an incandescent bulb had failed and this had tripped out all the lights, which meant they had fallen over the cat, dog or whatever.
But the lights I hate are those halogen MR16 and GU10 bulbs. There average life span is very short and the light they give out, used to give me headches until I went gluten free. I have a lot of those size of bulb in this house and all have been replaced with LED versions, which are brighter, use less energy and rarely fail.
My real problem in this house is finding some lights to replace some of the awful ones that Jerry installed to boost his profits.
Some Truly Hideous Lights
They really are truly hideous. Some of the lights he used were even worse and when I left them on the front patio for someone to take if they wanted, they didn’t remove one. But they did take a couple of old incandescent bulbs!
Not Big Sellers
If I want to get rid of anything that might be useful to someone, I just put it on the front patio with a note saying it’s alright to take it. But not these lights!
A Box of Useless Lights
They’re obviously too awful for even the grottiest cellar, attic or garden shed. They were of course installed in this house by Jerry, who never missed a chsnce to use crap, where quality was specified.
Although I must say someone did rumage through and take all the tungsten light bulbs.
And Now I’ve Got No Hot Water
This is only a small thing in the major scheme of things. But my hot water failed last week!
It appeared that my clothes washer had failed and had somehow buggered the main fuse box or at least the part of it that controlled the gas water heater.
It didn’t matter too much, as I only use hot water for showers and I could have them at my physio or as I did at the weekend at the hotel I stayed in at Plymouth.
The electrician came yesterday and found that Jerry had struck again, in that he’d not connected the electrics properly.
Once that had been sorted, it now appeared that that the cause of the failure wasn’t the washing machine, but the control system of the boiler had shorted. Obviously, at the moment, it was only set to provide hot water, but it does explain how sometimes in the winter, the house could never seem to get the temperature right.
And then guess what! The stand-by immersion heater doesn’t work. It must have failed some years ago, and the tenant and/or the landlord never got round to replacing it.
So never buy a house that has been rented without a full survey on all the electrics too!
Jerry Couldn’t Put Up Coat Hooks Either!
The hooks for dressing gowns in the downstairs bathroom were hideous wooden ones, which if they’d cost a pound each in Dalston Market, you would have been robbed.
After taking one down, I found this behind it.
How Not To Put Up Hooks
So Jerry couldn’t even put up hooks in tiles without making lots of unnecessary holes. Note the two at the top as well!
Either that, or I’ve got woodworm that can chew through tiles.
Is The Cause of High Unemployment Our Housing and Transport Policies?
There was a program on BBC Radio 5 this morning about unemployment. It was the usual left versus right battle, which has been fought so many times to a non-conclusion, that the program got boring, so I went shopping at Upper Street.
I have lived in several houses and flats in my life and in some ways, where I am now suits me best. Visitors like it too and they feel it is absolutely right for me.
So what is this house like. It’s a three bed-roomed house with two en-suite bathrooms and one that isn’t. It’s modern and it’s built upside down, with two bedrooms, a bathroom and the garage on the ground floor and a seven-metre square living area, kitchen and a bedroom on the first floor. It has a lot of chocolate-coloured steel and big glass windows. Unfortunately, it was built by Jerry. It doesn’t have a garden, but it does have two patios front and back.
In some ways the nearest to it in feel, was our flat in Cromwell Tower, in the Barbican, where we raised our three sons for the first few years of their lives. There we had three bedrooms, a large living room, kitchen, an underground car park and superb views across to St. Paul’s.
My house is however not the sort of house that most people aspire to or in fact that many can afford.
So many prefer one of Pete Seeger ‘s Little Boxes on a new estate somewhere in the countryside with space for two cars. After all, these sort of estates don’t get inhabitated by the riff-raff do they? They are also as eco-friendly as Obama’s Beast.
I have now come to the conclusion that I don’t like to live in the countryside. It is all so sterile, unfriendly and full of lots of little cliques. After the loss of C and my son, not one person in the village came to see me. After all I was a loser wasn’t I, especially as I had a stroke? There’s a great belief too, that widows might decide to walk off with your partner! It was a real relief to escape on a train to somewhere, where something actually happened. But there was no public transport, so simple things like getting any food meant a taxi or scounging a lift.
I also should say I hated living in Cockfosters as a child. There the problem was that there were no children of my own age and most of my school friends lived some distance away. Only when I was old enough to work in my father’s print works and ride my bike all over the area did I feel liberated.
How I live now, is surprisingly similar to how C and I used to live with the boys in the Barbican and St. John’s Wood before that. Except of course that I am now alone and do the things like food shopping, that C used to do. But then when I wander round Chapel Market, it’s like going back to the early seventies and she’s still guiding me.
It’s a friendly and a mixed area, with some good shops, four pubs that know their gluten-free within walking distance, several gardens and superb public transport links. The people are friendly too and I’m starting to add to my circle of friends. In this sort of mixed area, you also develop passing acquaintances with people, who you say hello to as you pass. In the countryside, it’s a bit difficult to talk to someone about their basset hound as I did today, when the dog is in the back of a 4×4 passing at speed.
So the sort of mixed area where I live is not to most people’s taste, but in my view, if we want to decrease unemployment and create worthwhile jobs, then this sort of area can do it’s bit. Another mixed area, I know well is the centre of Cambridge and it could be argued that that mixing helps with the development of ideas.
How many good ideas have been hatched in pubs or coffee shops? Sterile country villages might have an award winning gastro-pub, but the only ideas that come out of places like that, are things like better ways to cook asparagus.
One of the complaints in all the villages I’ve lived was the lack of any staff locally. This was mainly because, those same people didn’t want any affordable housing built, that might spoil their view and lower the tone of the place. I have a lovely lady, who sorts my house out, once a week and she was fairly easy to find. Incidentally she comes on a bus from the other side of Dalston JUnction station. so just at a selfish level, good public transport helps people to get to their jobs. In those much admired villages, there is no public transport, so everybody has to drive, so those that can’t afford their own car, often can’t get a decent job. But then a lot of those that live in villages don’t want more public transport, because of all the noise and inconvenience of passing a bus in a large 4×4. But they have their own cars anyway!
To illustrate what I say further, I will take the Suffolk town of Haverhill, which has large numbers of little boxes, which asre being added too at a fast rate. There are jobs in the town, but many require a car to get to, as the town isn’t the most cycle-friendly and the public transport is limited. Haverhill is also a sensible commute to Cambridge, where there are far better-paid and more worthwhile jobs, but the only way to do it, is to use a bus or car. There used to be a railway, but that was axed in the Beeching cuts. Axing it actually wasn’t the problem, but building over the right-of-way was, as that railway, which is needed to provide a link etween Sudbury and Cambridge, could have been reinstated. In Scotland, they have been reinstating railways like Airdrie to Bathgate with some degree of success.
If I was in charge of eployment policy in this country, I would reinstate railways like Sudbury to Cambridge, as they not only create employment, but allow people to get better jobs. Recently, the line from Ipswich to Cambridge has been updated with better and bigger trains and the investment has led to a large increase in passenger numbers.
Where I live, we also have the example of the recently-rebuilt North and East London Lines of the London Overground, which are now used and liked by everybody. In fact, so much so, that frequencies are being increased.
I have also read and heard stories how the new lines have decreased unemployment, just by enabling people to move more easily from where they live to where the jobs are.
I think too, we concentrate on unemployment and rightly so, but in many cases better transport links will enable people to move up the employment ladder. This is just as important, as not only does it create a need to replace the person who’s left, but if people earn more, they tend to spend more and that helps to create jobs.
The Anonymous Widower 