It’s been 97 days since our house flooded and we had to evacuate. We’re now living medium-term in a “chicory
house” a few minutes drive away, but there’s still plenty of reason for us to return frequently to the disaster site that is our actual
house.
Today, for example, JTA and I went to show around some contractors who will eventually, we hope, be able to install new floors,
skirting boards, remove and replace a wall, rebuild the kitchen, fix the electrics…
It’s been over three months since we had to move out. With the drying-out complete, it’s finally time to begin planning to start scheduling
the start of the repair work that needs doing. What a painfully-slow process!
The day after the flood water receded, I took this photo while we were assessing damage – you can see the tide marks left by the water:
That picture shows part of our piano, which took in a lot of water and was significantly damaged. It’s off at a nice piano hospital right now being repaired, and I miss it much more
than I expected.
After playing maybe ten minutes a day almost every day for years, I routinely get up from my desk to stretch my legs or heat up my lunch and my fingers itch to plink-plonk away
at it. Of all the hundred inconveniences of our temporary living situation and everything that goes along with it, that’s the one
that bites most-frequently. It’s a strange sensation.
But all the builders and the insurance company and everybody else seem confident that they can get us back into our home in the Autumn, and certainly by Christmas, so there’s something
to look forward to. A light at the end of the tunnel.
The Chicory House’s water meter, found in a cupboard, is so much easier to read than the one at our regular house, which is found down a frequently-flooded manhole on
the busy road outside.
Unfortunately, Thames Water had fucked-up1
and created an account for us already with the wrong information2,
so by the time I’d reached out to them they were already getting themselves into a pickle.
It turns out that, presumably because of some shortsightedness on the part of their software engineers, their computer systems wouldn’t let them change the information to
correct the problem. Nor could they simply delete the account and create a new one3.
Instead, the had to close the account they’d erroneously set up such that the start and end date of the contract was our moving-in date… and then set up
a new account starting from the day after.
Sigh. Fine! So long as it’s sorted, I didn’t even care. Until, that is, the bill arrived for the one day of the first (incorrectly-created) contract:
This looks pretty low for a metered water bill, until you realise that it covers a period of literally only eleven hours from us moving in (and taking a meter reading) until
the end of that day. And that during most of that time the water was switched-off because a pair of plumbers were installing a new bathroom!
That bill:
is for £13.16.
covers “9 April 2026 through 9 April 2026”, i.e. one day.
(which means that our estimated annual bill would be £4,803.40 (£13.16 × 365) – about eight times
the national average)
states that our account closure was/will be “04/09/2026” – the only date on the letter that’s in “short” date format and which would appear to be 4 September (in UK date format)
even though 9 April would make more sense (but would require interpreting it in US date format, which would make no sense).
Let’s see how that breaks down:
The rates are standard, albeit a little on the high end: Thames Water need to raise funds right now to fix all of the leaks in their pipes, apparently. What’s odd is the volume of
water they claim has been used.
According to this bill, we used three cubic metres of water between collecting the keys (at around 1pm), moving in, and taking a meter reading… and the end of the
day. That’s three thousand litres of water.
Is it possible to achieve that level of water usage in the nine hours of billable time that this bill covers? I guess, if you really tried, you could:
completely fill and then drain our 100-litre bathtub, three times an hour, taking a five-and-a-half minute bath in each before draining it again, for the rest of
the day4;
or
run the kitchen tap – the highest-pressure tap in the house – continuously for six hours and forty minutes; or
repeatedly flush all three toilets, on “full-flush” mode, once every 79 seconds until midnight5, for example.
Some science was involved in the writing of this blog post.
Obviously this is all ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous.
But then again, so is this bill, which claims that three adults spent 11 hours in a house and somehow used the amount of water that’s the recommended amount to drink in a day… by 1,500
adults. Despite the water being shut-off to install a shower and toilet for some of that time.
But then again, so is Thames Water’s computer system, which disallows the correction of mistakes even by their own staff and instead requires the creation of one-day contracts.
And also can’t decide which country’s date format to use. And, possibly, doesn’t allow them to obey data protection laws.
The whole thing’s ridiculous. Which I’ll be letting Thames Water know. Let’s see if they agree.
Footnotes
1 This may be no surprise to anybody who’s ever dealt with Thames Water before, or who
follows the news about their seemingly endless inability to keep clean water in its pipes and raw sewage out of our rivers, for example, while taking out loans in order to pay bonuses
to their self-back-patting executives.
2 They used information provided to them by the estate agent and failed to connect it to
the information they already had for us… which thanks to quirks of their information systems resulted in bigger problems down the line. Amusingly – and for a change! – none
of the problems were related to my unusual name, this time around.
3 Curiously, these initial mistakes on the part of Thames Water left them processing
personal information about me – an email address – that I’d never given to them, and allegedly unable to delete or correct it for six months after being asked to. This is the kind of
thing that normally gives me an excuse for a field day of DPA2018-related letter writing, but this time around I’ve been too busy dealing with the bigger problems they’ve
created to have a chance to stop and think about that: that’s how much of a mess they’ve made.
4 It’s only barely possible to repeatedly fill the bath this quickly, you need to use both
hot and cold water: the cold inlet alone doesn’t have the pressure to fill it fast enough, but the hot water tank has its own separate inlet which makes all the difference.
Also, a cold bath would suck, even if you’re only allowed five minutes in it before it’s time to drain the tub and start filling it again.
5 I once had a really rough night after a particularly dodgy curry, but I’ve never needed
to be flushing a toilet twice a minute for eleven hours.
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’.
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.
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!
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. 😱
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!
Towards the end of last week we picked up the keys to the Chicory House.1 We’ve now officially moved in to
the place we’ll be calling home for the next six months or so, while we wait for our Actual House to be repaired following our catastrophic flood in February.2
As part of my efforts to travel light, I use a pretty small
wallet – a lump of carbon fibre about the size of a deck of cards3 that contains my ID, bank cards, and – in pocket at the back – my essential keys.
Typically that’s my front door key and my bike lock key.
The keys tuck in around the back, but there’s a “hook” on the end to which additional keys can be ringed. Sometimes I hook up a second-factor hardware token to it when I’m travelling
with one.
And so when I received my front door key to the Chicory House, I had to decide: where does this key belong?
The obvious answer would have been to remove the front door key for my actual home from its special place within my wallet and replace it with the Chicory House’s front
door key. That’s the one I’ll need most-often for the foreseeable future, right? My regular front door key can move to the supplementary hook, on a ring, and/or be removed entirely and
taken with me only when I need to visit my uninhabitable home.
But that’s not what I did.
I didn’t even think about what I was doing until I noticed, afterwards, that I’d chosen to put the Chicory House key on the “supplementary keys” hook rather than in the “primary keys”
spot.
This made sense as an instinctive move: it’s where I’d clip on the key to any of the half-dozen or so AirBnBs I’ve lived in for the last couple of months, after all! But for a house I’m
going to live in for half a year or more it doesn’t seem so rational.
But I haven’t put it back. I think I’m keeping it this way. My regular key gets to keep its special spot because it represents the lost status quo and the aspiration to return. Sure,
it’s less-practical for me to keep it there, but its position is symbolic, not sensible.
Swapping the two over would feel like giving in: like caving to the inevitability of us being out of our home for an extended period. Keeping the key where it is means that every time I
put my hand in my pocket I’m reminded that the current arrangement is temporary; things will go back to normal. And that’s nice.4
2 The flood was exactly two months ago today, which makes today “F-Day plus 60”. We’ve
spent most of the intervening time hopping from AirBnB to AirBnB.
3 As somebody who often carries a deck of cards, this is a pretty-convenient size to me!
4 That said, the Chicory House is way better than most of the AirBnB’s we’ve
been living in, and I’m especially loving being able to sleep on my own familiar mattress again! While I wouldn’t want to live here forever like I’d be happy to in
the place we’ve called home since 2020, it’ll certainly suffice for the
immediate future. A stepping-stone back towards the lives we’d built before.
Today’s mission in what we’re calling the Chicory House – our home while our actual house gets repaired – was to unpack the kitchen. I think it’s looking pretty good!
The cardboard box you can see contains pans we brought with us that turn out to be incompatible with the induction hobs at the Chicory House, boo!
Next weekend’s mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn’t the conservatory dining table. 😬
It’s fifty-five days since my house flooded. Since then, I’ve lived in hotels, with friends, on volunteering retreats and – mostly – in a series of one- or two-week AirBnB-style
short-term lets. It’s been wild. It’s also been wildly disruptive. To our work. To our kids. To our general stability.
Today, we make a change. Today we’re moving into a medium-term let: sonewhere we can stay for the… say… six months or so it’ll take to actually repair our house so we can move back in.
We’ll have our own space again in a way we haven’t in a couple of months.
I know the hard work isn’t done. Our house is still a wreck! But it feels like, perhaps, we’re beginning the second act of the three-act play “The Year Of The Flood”. And that feels
like progress.
Right, I’d better go move house! (for like the seventh time this year…)
It’s my final day in the cute garden office of the AirBnB we’re living in, this week, and every time I step through the door I catch a glimpse
of our small, sandy-coloured dog squatting in the garden.
Except the dog isn’t even here. My brain keeps getting tricked… by this statue of a pig:
I’ve lived in a LOT of different places these last few months while we’ve been arranging a place to live for the next six months or so of our house repairs. Each new AirBnB has had its
pros and cons (and each hasn’t felt like “home”).
But man, I really like the “garden office” at our current one. So nice to work in the sun!
(I don’t like the slow WiFi as much, but yeah… pros and cons!)
The final of the short term lets we’re staying in (before we switch to a medium-term one!) while our flooded house is repaired is also perhaps the prettiest. Our village this week is
peak-Cotswolds, for sure!
QEF for the geohound and I as we came out for a walk from the house we’re borrowing this week – the latest of many AirBnB-like week-long lets we’ve had to decamp to after our house was
rendered uninhabitable by a flash flood around fifty days ago. Hopefully the last, though, as the insurance company may at last have found us somewhere to live longer-term while our
house is repaired!
Cache container seemed slightly exposed by damage to a nearby fence so I tucked it back in slightly deeper than I found it.
TFTC and for showing us this delightful footpath which is sure to become a favourite walking route for the doggo and I during our week here.
