Tag: houses
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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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Boring Polyamory: Equality and Bedrooms
The other month, I described my polyamory as 'boring', which attracted lots of interesting questions and feedback. Let's address the first one - why does my partner not have a bedroom of 'her own', even though both of her partners get one?
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A hundred and fifty one days since we were flooded out of our house, and I needed to visit to meet a contractor. The garden's starting to get a little wild, this summer: we've been periodically visiting to mow the lawn, but our hedge seems to have decided that this could be the year that it will consume the gate once and for all...
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In a verdant garden, an unkempt hedge of various species grows into the space of a green-painted wooden gate, beginning to hide 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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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!
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Chicory Keys
There's a special spot in my wallet where my "front door key" lives, but - despite the practical reasons to do so - I've resisted adding the Chicory House key in that spot. Instead, I've found myself keeping it in the "secondary key" spot, as a tiny reminder that the current state of affairs is a temporary one.
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Unpacked Kitchen
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. 😬 -
The dog is concerned. Why, despite all her warnings, am I still letting these men take all of our (surviving) furniture?
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A French Bulldog sits on a lawn outside a house where a removals company is loading furniture into a van.
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F-Day plus 55
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 … -
F-Day plus 38
It's 38 days since our house was damaged in a flash flood, and today's the first of our 'BER' assessment. BER stands for Beyond Economical Repair. It basically means that anything on the list is something that the insurance company intend to 'write off': to declare irreparable or not-worth repairing and scrap, replacing it with …
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It's F-Day plus 35, and I'm spending a few hours working in the habitable part of our flood-damaged house while I'm "between" two AirBnBs.
The dog, who doesn't normally get to come upstairs, is sitting with me on the landing. Except she also wants to keep an eye on what's happening downstairs.
The result? Her back legs are sitting and her front legs are standing as she peers blepfully down the stairs.
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A champagne-coloured French Bulldog wearing a teal harness is on the top step of a cream-carpeted staircase. Her hind legs are folded so her bottom sits on the top step, but her forelegs are extended so she's standing on the one below. Her tongue is out in a full blep.
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A Hundred Inconveniences
It's F-Day plus 31, and our flood-disrupted lives have become defined by the hundred or so daily inconveniences that are imposed by our accidentally-nomadic lifestyle. Here's hoping we can sort-out some more stable accommodation sometime soon!
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F-Day plus 19
Nineteen days after my house flooded, causing extensive damage on the ground floor, the insurance company has finally accepted the claim and is willing to pay for our temporary accommodation in the meantime (a few days in a hotel, a few days with friends although that's not paid-for, four weeks in two different holiday lets), although we're still waiting for their thumbs-up on a proposal for a ~6-month let of a house to live in while our floors are replaced and our kitchen rebuilt and whatnot.
Meanwhile, yesterday a surveyor came around and looked at all of our walls. Everything still feels like it's taking a very long time. I appreciate that insurance companies are a maze of bureaucracy and procedure, but from "this side" of the table - living and working out of strange places, never really feeling "unpacked" but without it being a holiday - it's all a bit of a drag!