That sinking feeling ...!

The run up to Christmas has been quite extraordinary this year and we did wonder if we would ever be ready, but we made it!

Up till a week before Christmas we were living in our caravan at the new Conkers Camping and Caravan Site at Bath Lane Moira, while the builders were in our house rebuilding our ground floor! We were there with the dogs for 8 weeks. The cats, meanwhile, were boarded at the cattery. It’s a long story …

Back in April we came home from a holiday in Wales and detected a strong smell of gas when we opened the front door. We called in the emergency gas engineer. He eventually detected the leak to the underfloor pipe to our gas fire in the living room, condemned the fire and sealed off the gas pipe. As that pipe also supplied the gas cooker, we had to have a new pipe routed from the meter to the cooker. We decided to remove the gas fire completely as we never use it.

It was at this point that we noticed that the floor was now a good 2 inches below the skirting board! Evidently the floor had dropped, which had caused the fractured gas pipe. The cause of the drop, we worked out, was a water main burst under our neighbours’ garage, which they had had fixed by their insurers in the two months previous. As the ground dried out, our floor had dropped!

We called our insurers who sent various assessors and structural engineers to inspect but finally agreed to finance the remedial work. Then the summer floods hit and our claim was put onto the back boiler, understandably, while more urgent claims were dealt with. In the meantime I began packing in preparation for moving out (we had to clear the whole ground floor area into Pickford’s storage).

Finally, we moved out on 19 October, with an anticipated work schedule of two weeks. But when the builders lifted the flooring they found the problem was much bigger than they’d anticipated, and the whole floor had to be removed right down to soil level. The original builders had cut corners when laying the sub floor and the whole floor had failed! That meant rebuilding the floor to modern building regs, including piling and reinforcing – a much longer job, as each layer took ages to dry out.

Our stay at the caravan was extended several times and one weekend we went to stay with Judi and Dave in Wales because we had exceeded the 28 day residency rule! We then moved back onto site and started counting again. With Christmas looming and our final deadline for returning the caravan to our secure storage before the Christmas lock-down, the insurers put the squeeze on the builders and we finally moved back home on 15 December!

It was a mad scramble to unpack and settle back into the house before Christmas, as well as catching up on Christmas shopping. We had at least managed to write most of the cards while we were in the caravan, and we completed the shopping in time to catch the last post. We unpacked what we needed and stowed the rest of the boxes to be dealt with in due course.

The bonus is that we have a newly decorated living room, with new laminate flooring. The hearth has been removed, but we decided to keep the brick “chimney breast” as a feature and have treated ourselves to a flat screen TV which will sit or hang there very nicely. We had already removed the brick archway several years ago, so the whole room is opened up and looks much bigger. We took the opportunity to rethink the layout of the furniture and have discarded some unnecessary clutter. With our new settees in place (bought in August) we are very pleased with our “new” living space.