I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to work with that bloke: I know he's come highly recommended, and can start immediately [which is setting off my hinkiness meter], but he does not shut up. Sorry, that doesn't do it justice: the bloke DOES NOT STOP TALKING!
AND: he does not listen! We are squeezed tight for budget, so are trying to economise at every turn; we've already cut out all the 'it would be nice to have' things from the list, and are trimming the 'only vaguely essential' bits, but he wouldn't accept that I would prefer to re-use perfectly-good-but-not-attractive white light switches rather than pay £3.20 [or £3.50, or £5; the price he mentions keeps changing] so that he can be happy with the results. He keeps saying 'you don't want a square-edged, cheap fitting do you?' and I keep saying that I really don't care, and that we can change them later, I just don't want the solid brass ones. And he doesn't get it!
After about twenty minutes of that I got quite upset, and I think he might back down, but I hate getting upset and don't understand why an expensive re-wire has to cost more to keep the electrician happy with his choice of fittings. I'm hoping that the future will bring support from my beloved spouse, as I've wrangled profligate-with-my-money tradesmen on my own for far too long.
We are already juggling the finances; until we've spoken to the plumber and a builder, joiner, stove-installer, and got the quotes back from the tree surgeon and window installer we won't know how tight it's going to be, but I really don't want to waste money on something I don't want to keep an electrician (who I am never going to use again) happy. I can barely face the thought of working with him for the next 26 days, so the idea of asking him back has me twitching slightly at the edges.
I'm going to have to find a way to politely say: shut up! We have work to do, even if he doesn't [and he does; we're paying him a lot of money]. Yesterday, in the tenth [at a conservative estimate] retelling of "there is no earth attached to these sockets, and no earth in the house, and metal fittings are dangerous", he took up two hours of our valuable time. I got so fed up I walked off and scrubbed off all the black mould on the bedroom floor before I heard David make his escape.
 |
| Bedroom toadstools :-( |
 |
| Rehydrated by the bleach-water |
It just occurred to me that the Australians have a phrase for hard work: hard yakka; I think I'm going to find this hard yakking!
One useful thing that did come out of the two hours of my life that I will never get back was an explanation of the new EU-mandated wiring: we now have brown, black & grey + earth as 3-core, and brown, blue + earth as 2 core... Sort of logical, as consumers are used to seeing brown and blue on 2-core flex, until you remember that the old system had black as the live... He has already seen a place wired up with the black as live; I'm sure it's a great development for colour-blind electricians [not sure that's a trade where I'd want colour-blindness in operation in my home's wiring?] and cable-manufacturers [now they don't have to do all those pesky colours for different countries], and everything is now standardised across the EU...
Until you consider that every country has its own regulations, and a UK electrician can't work in France (and vice versa) for the very good reason that each country does things very differently! So we have a new, standardised, (confusing to at least part of the EU) wire cabling, but in all other ways it's completely different how it is used.
Now I seem to have got out of my system my rant about Steve, he did point out more amusing [we're taking the path of' better to laugh than to cry'] hazards in our new home:
- 6Amp light cabling directly off a 30Amp power socket; not fused, no means of isolation, not switched
- Brass light switch that had never been earthed, no RCD in the system
- Other exposed wiring in switches/sockets
- The cabling to the hanging-from-the-wall cooker socket in the kitchen [so heaviest cabling/power usage in the house] was rubberised [the old vulcanised housing, so decades out of date (Dad was replacing that stuff in the early '70s)] and perished rubber that crumbled to the touch, at that
We saved £9.99 by not having a nice once, but that's a tenner saved, so it all counts [not sure how Steve is going to take it when I tell him we're thinking of re-using the brass sockets, at least pro tem], and if he fits a temporary circuit board with a couple of sockets, I will finally be able to invite my beloved MJ around for tea [now that is a "yay!", but not the yay.].
OK, the diaphragm in the cistern is being increasingly problematic, so it's back to pouring a bucket of water down the pan rather than pushing a handle, but we have a flushing loo; it's all good.
Whilst we were at B&Q finding the loo seat, but not finding a gutter-downspout-keeper-out-of-leaves, we spotted the Hippo skip-in-a-bags. We're going to try one of those; it will be nice to have a receptacle (that will be carted away when full) to fill with the bits of rubble we are unearthing instead of piling it all up, hiring a skip, and then filling the skip as quickly as possible.
It might be a much-more expensive way of doing things, but we'll have a re-think once we see how much more rubbish we find/how quickly it fills up.
I finished my pottering in the house, and headed to the bonfire site to join David [my excuse to cut Steve short on that occasion], where he was supposed to be just preparing branches to go on the fire; turned out he'd put a pile of brambles and grass where we'd lit the fire yesterday and it started to smoke almost immediately, and was in flame within 15 minutes. Despite my best efforts of Sunday evening, there was still a lot of heat in the ashes.
Didn't need the firelighters or matches, then!
We burned choppings/trimmings for a few hours, and decided to stop earlier [we'd quit at dusk on Sunday] to allow the embers to die down sooner than before, and to have some food [breakfast for me; lunch for David]. David brought the coolbox, water & folding picnic chairs to the bonfire site, ostensibly to keep an eye on the flames [but in reality to not stop Steve working once he had got going; to be fair to him he had worked when there were no distractions], and said it was nearly 5pm!
At that point a van rolled into the drive - and this is the "yay!": UK Power Networks written on the side.
Yay!
It seems our fifth call to them was a success; we were so pleased to see the chap, it was probably comical to him; we let Steve talk to him and his colleague, as he was hoping to get some form of power supply so that he can chase out walls to re-wire [so we don't have to have a generator on site], and to get them to install an earth connection. David and I left them to it, and he pulled some nettles while I hacked off part of a briar patch as the light fell. The first guy needed to wait for a second chap, and then they needed a cherry picker, so they were working in the dark for a while.
We worked until we couldn't see any more, and then packed up the tools and the house by torch and candlelight; (not the romantic 'first candlelit *whatever' [*insert occasion of your choice] that I'd been planning) as we were waiting for the four other vans to leave. It felt really good to know the house was safe, and no longer a danger to any workmen we'd have there.
Shiny new cabling, a cut off that works, and the ability for Steve to fit a consumer unit (?) for now so we can have a couple of sockets for him (and that we can use too); result. I don't think they fitted the earth, but that was a wish-list hope rather than a realistic one [so will have to be found in the budget somehow].
We rolled out of the gate at 8pm and slept like logs, again.
No comments:
Post a Comment