It feels like a home, Ok, a shell of a home, but a home, it’s clean (mainly) has walls that look good, Ian is painting the skirting and architrave and fittings we chose are in. Exciting times! Another delivery brings a big step forward.
More boxes, this time containing wardrobes! I can hardly believe it. The only room fully ready is bed 2 (no longer the blue room). To ensure a sense of space, we aren’t having wardrobes in our room, they are going in bed 2, and so that’s why they are the first installation. The carcasses are in progress and the day is going well. We’ve done a few more jobs and before we know it, its 4pm and we haven’t yet eaten anything. We decide to just crack on and have an early tea rather than stop now, as we are in full flow with the wardrobes. I have some life admin do to, so we decide we’ll get this bit done, I will head to Agy, sort tea out and do the admin and Ian will fit the doors and shelves, drawers etc. It has been incredibly wet and windy today with rain waves heading down the road outside. Agy was rocking, but all looked good.
The final carcass is built and in place by about 6pm I head to Agy and it is freezing in there! Now the house is cold, about 16 degrees in the day, but Agy is really cold. Something is wrong, the heating should be on. I check, we have no electric… a week or so ago we did discover someone had unplugged Agy as they walked home from school and so I presumed someone had done that again, we laughed last time as it wasn’t a problem, but no, She is plugged in. it’s something bigger. I get Ian and we begin investigating. By now, it is about 10 degrees dark and windy on a Sunday night, not the best time to have no electric or heat. There isn’t damp in the van's external socket, which was the most likely problem with the weather today, so it must be something else. Ian ends up contorted in all sorts of strange positions trying to fathom what could be wrong with Agy’s electrics, has something shorted, damp got in, something burnt out? Nothing. The house electrics just keep tripping whenever we turn it on. Agy is not the problem. So we head to the other end of the cable that is plugged into the garage. The garage sockets trip the electric again, so maybe it is the garage.
I head to a neighbour to see if they have a very long extension lead we can plug into the house through the letterbox to Agy to tide us over. Luckily this neighbour was an electrician, so offers to help if we need it. Back I go with the extension lead, but no, that doesn’t work either! Clearly something is wrong with the house electrics. The lights work, but not the sockets, the moment anything with an earth is plugged in, it trips. This means we have no heating in the van or power in the house, our solar will keep the fridge and lights on in Agy, but it can’t run the electric heating. We have gas heating too, but that uses a lot of gas, and we don’t really want to use it all up as we need that for cooking. Refilling in lockdown isn’t so easy as normal. Ian sends me back to ask for the neighbour’s help.
With no worries about heading out on a very cold Sunday evening in mid November he joins us with testers and a torch and sets about investigating. He tests all the sockets Ian has changed or installed. All perfect, he checks lots of things, but no obvious answer, then suddenly it all works. Nothings has changed, it’s fine, working. We are all perplexed, but Ian and I are very thankful. It may have taken a couple of hours, and we are frozen to the bone and starving, as it is now 8pm, and we still haven’t eaten. Ian and our neighbour agree, it could be damp travelling up a cable, or in one if the garden outside sockets, or it maybe the RCD needs changing as it has tripped a few times and maybe it is just a bit too old and over sensitive, our neighbour is happy to do this with Ian as he knows exactly what he is doing, so Ian gets ordering a new one and we hope it stays on.
We finally eat our chicken casserole at about 9pm, the wardrobes are built and Agy is warm. Phew!
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