Quelle Semaine (Part I)

Whoeeeee. What a week that was.

First, the backstory. Couple of weeks or a bit more ago, one rainy, rainy evening in June, your hero, Kev the Magnificent, was alone in the house with only a small Springer Spaniel puppy to keep him company. It was a wild and stormy night when he discovered that water was drip, drip, drippety drip, drip, dripping through the kitchen ceiling. With great aplomb our hero put a bucket under the drip. Next day, a phone call to the mighty Alf got a visit and some mastic tipped into the hole that had appeared in the roof.

The next day there was a new leak in the dining room. Two different leaks in two different parts of the flat roofed extension. Alf came out again and put some blue tarpaulin over the whole roof.

Over the following two weeks it quickly became apparent that, despite the blue tarpaulin, whenever it rained the rain came on an extended visit to the Dining Room. We begaan to get used to a life that featured buckets littered around the floor. Two weeks ago today, Paul the Stripper came to remove the wallpaper in the Living Room. Redecorating the Living Room has been in planning since before our Superhero fell down the stairs with such winning style and rupturing speed. All the paper was stripped off by the end of Tuesday th July. That gets us up to the start of the week from ............

drum roll at this point from the looney drummer who lives across the back lane and who gives us a virtuoso performance on the drums on every occasion when the sun shines.

from ....................................................... HELL

or at least Stevenage! (Don't ask, Danielle, I've gone INSANE. I cannot explain it either.)

So twas on the Monday Morning that the Plasterer came round,
with his trowel and his Float and his Merry Plasterer's Song.

Well, Clint arrived!

No, not Clint Eastwood, Clint the Plasterer and, YES, before you ask that really is his name.

Clint lives just across the Close from us and, when we decided that we wanted to replaster the Lounge, he was recommended to us by the quality of his work in other houses in the Close.

The week began by Clint inspecting the ceiling in the Dining Room and Kitchen and deciding that the best thing to do was to begin by pulling down what remained of the ceiling. So Pat, Me and the Doggie went off to live in the Summer House (It's really a big shed in the garden but Summer House sounds better.

We'd been sitting there about an hour when Clint popped out and said, "We have a bit of a problem. You have a couple of Wasps Nests in the Kitchen Ceiling and they were not best pleased when I pulled the ceiling down." The kitchen and Dining Room were now filled with very energetic wasps out to kill, or at least sting mightily.

I pointed out that there was no problem because we were covered by a special vermin insurance policy taken out with a local Utility Company.

So I rang them. I'll cut a very long, involved and aggravating period of time down to size. After a couple of hours of aggravation the Insurance Company told me that the Vermin Extermination Company could deal with my Wasp infestation on ..... Wednesday. So there we were, three of us and a Spaniel sitting in the rain, in the garden, while the House was occupied by a couple of swarms of mad wasps, and the extermination company were suggesting that they solve the problem by killing the little BEEs (sorry, Wasps) a couple of days later.

I think I will leave it to you to work out what I told them to do with their Insurance contract, but it involved folding it into a multi-pointed tesseract and sticking it somewhere interesting!

Clint, bless his soul, went off to the local builder's merchants and bought a paper suit and a can of wasp destroyer spray mousse (also sold as hair gel in a similar but subtly different can) and, after a merry chase obliterating the wasp nest. I feel sorry for the wasps, but not very sorry.

So Monday ended in a house with no ceiling in the kitchen or Dining Room and a leaky roof above the no ceiling, together with a faint smell of wasp destroying chemicals.

But at least it wasn't raining.


PAUSE


Sound of Thunder and Lightning right over head. Oh Bu****.

Pitter, patter, pitterpatterpitterpatter splosh! Drip


Drip



Drip



Tell you about the rest of the week tomorrow!