Today was a lovely day. Despite the loveliness of having a project to do with lots of tasks, it can be a bit lonely undertaking it on my own (or at least, it is when it’s not punctuated by lots of visits from builders!). However, Friday is Matt’s day off, so we went across together for the day. We arrived to find that a random builder had put his card through the door, so, deciding that 4 quotes weren’t enough (not that I’ve actually been sent more than one yet…) I decided to go for another one, and rang this bloke up. He agreed to come round at 10:30am. Before that, Matt and I used our twin strippers (not very identical at all really) and got to work. Builder turned up at 10ish, with a sparky, and we showed them both around and explained what we wanted. He announced that he couldn’t start till the beginning of April - and that the job would take 6 months!!! That was definitely not to my time frame!!! However, we’ll wait for the quotation and see! After that, we had a cuppa, and went to start our second round of stripping each (this is starting to sound like a very bad game of strip poker or something!) Matt was going great guns - but my stripper wouldn’t heat up. I tried a different socket, and checked that I hadn’t tripped anything, and then tried another fuse (from a spare plug lying around, so wasn’t 100% certain it would work - still no success)

We then paused whilst the tumble dryer was picked up and taken away by a local mum who has two children in real nappies at the moment(!) and I then looked to see if one could buy spare parts for the stripper - not looking promising.

We were disturbed by a knock on the door, “Excuse me, do you have any problem with rats?” This gentleman said that he had been hired to come out and deal with the rats in the neighbours house, because they had twice had them chew through the boiler cables (I don’t know why that one happens to be the tasty one!) We haven’t seen anything, but one of the builders has said that he has seen evidence of rodents in the attic, and we have found that every room had an ultrasonic rodent repeller plugged in a socket somewhere. We then had a very bizarre hour or so with this man checking our drains and being confused. The drain at the front of our house is completely dry, and doesn’t look like it’s been used for years. However, the water flows fine when we took off the drain cover from the back, and it looks like the pipe goes towards the front drain - we can’t find another drain access point in use on our property, or on the neighbour’s property. This guy eventually got his camera and pipe out and stuck it all the way down our drain to see what was going on - but had to disappear (he wasn’t charging us for any of this!). He did offer to fit a non-return valve on our drains, but, given that he had just randomly turned up, we weren’t going to give him money (funnily enough!). He said that he was fitting a non-return valve on the neighbours drains, and that he was putting some strong poison down for the rats. Whilst he was in the process of putting the drain cover back on the dry drain, I saw a rat running across the road, completely unconcerned by us or any of the other people in the street - so they’re pretty bold. I am rather concerned about the rat poison, and am very glad that we haven’t moved in yet. Our cat is very good at chasing, catching, and eating rodents (as attested to by a previous neighbour, who after living next to us for about 6 months said, “I don’t really like cats, but I haven’t seen any rats around since your two moved in”!). I am hoping that the situation will have cleared up without any more poison soon. However, we have the council rodent officer coming around next week to have a look….

After lunch and nap, we headed back to the new house to meet the boy and do some more work. My further attempts at repairing the stripper met with no success, so we ordered a new one, and I spent my evening wandering around Oxford heading to Screwfix (second trip so far!)