Tag: flood 2026
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F-Day plus 214
It's been 214 days since I had to evacuate my house following a flood, and repair work is (intermittently) underway. And there are so-many moving pieces to this dance that... it's little wonder that people are getting confused.
Like:
Our insurance company appointed a relocations specialist to handle our temporary accommodation needs (moving … -
F-Day plus 204 (no content??)
HTTP status code 204 means "no content". No update. Nothing to tell you. F-Day plus 204 brings the same meaning: a disappointing lack of updates to the efforts to repair our house following getting flooded-out in February.
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My piano came home from the hospital
Five months ago, my house flooded. This week, the first completed repair work has been completed: fixing the upright piano that filled with water. The piano's back with us, in our temporary accommodation, and I couldn't be happier about it!
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F-Day plus 130
A hundred and thirty days since we got flooded out of our home, and remedial works are starting to ramp up. Today an electrician, tracing a fault that's developed in the wiring, cut a hole through a wall to repair it and threw up so much dust that it's hard to see anything!
I was nearby, helping a restoration company assess the damage to the ride-on lawnmower that was in the garage and whose motor hasn't started since (the garage saw some of the deepest water that hit us), when I heard the fire alarm and went to check on them. All is well: we don't need to add 'fire' to the list of disasters befalling our house this year! -
125 days since our house flooded, and the damaged furniture fittings, floors, underfloors, and now inner walls have been torn out.
Over a third of a year since we had to move out, I'm optimistic that perhaps, at last, reconstruction work is almost ready to begin.
It's a long, slow process. And there's clearly a way to go. But it's good to see progress happening.
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A view through a pair of dilapidated residential rooms, through the gaps in a hollowed-out partition wall.
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115 days since our house flood, the beginnings of the very first of the remedial works are taking place. Today, builders will drill through and lift part of a cracked poured-concrete foundation to work out what's beneath and whether it's stable enough to lay a new floor on top of. Also, somebody's coming around to quote for the laying of new floors (and we'll see if their numbers line up with those estimated by the insurance company).
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Several vehicles parked in the rain on the rural residential driveway of 'The Green'.
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F-Day plus 113
It's been 113 days since my house flooded and it's almost time for repair work to start! But first, I've got some repair work of my own to do: to a desk that needs moving and to a laptop that's misbehaving.
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There are many things I don't like about the kitchen in the Chicory House where we're living medium-term following our house flood.
But I like the fact that the integrated spice rack makes it much easier to see where we perhaps have a very-specific blind spot for "buying a new one where the last one's still more than half-full".
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Close-up of a spice rack containing not one, not two, not three but four tubs of 'ground white pepper by Sainsburys'.
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F-Day plus 97
It's been 97 days now since we were flooded-out of our home, and repair and rebuild work hasn't really even begun. But it's getting closer, and I'm looking forward to later this year sitting back in my own house (and probably at the piano!).
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£4,803.40 a Year for Water?
When we moved house, Thames Water failed to set us up an account correctly, and the hacky workaround they came up with claims that we spent our first 11 hours in the Chicory House perhaps pouring three tonnes of water into an ankle-depth 5×10 metre swimming pool.
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Man, I have missed having a battlestation to work at these last few months. It's nice to sit at one again, even if it's only a 'chicory battlestation'.
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Two laptops sit nestled between two large monitors, with a desktop computer on the floor below and a teleprompter/webcam on an arm above, in a brightly-sunlit garden office.
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The "regular" house's Internet connection finally switched-off last night, so I zipped around this morning and moved my NAS across to the Chicory House.
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Dan, a white man with a ponytail and a goatee beard, carries a large black cube-shaped computer down a staircase.
This was a challenging selfie to take. Unfortunately, Gigaclear haven't yet managed to fulfil their promise to reassign our static IP address to our new line, so this was swiftly followed by some DNS reconfiguration, sigh!
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My "commute" since moving to the Chicory House isn't much longer than it is at our regular home, but it does involve going outside. Want to see?
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As if I hadn't suffered enough "flood damage" this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup - hour the first time in months! - in our rental... by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱
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A desktop computer keyboard inverted over a kitchen sink, with many of its keycaps scattered around.
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Chicory, Coffee, and Code
Now that we've finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment... with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss!