The cold phew the cold
The cold phew the cold.
When I first moved in it was mild but the house felt like ice. Someone remarked on me needing an electric blanket and using bubble wrap to insulate drafty windows. I scoffed at this and two weeks later I had an electric blanket and bubble wrap at my windows. It was just soooo cold, I’d get up on a morning and be in three layers of clothes before you could blink. The amount of times I’d be wandering around the house wearing gloves and a furry hat, singing and dancing to stay warm, well it was all the time to start with.
The main problem though was the missing cap from the oil tank outside the building, whether the missing cap was due to a burglary or not is a moot point but I made up my mind (madness I know) not to put the heating on till I had the cap back in place and new oil in the tank. The cap took lots of finding, I’d asked Anna to look into it but she came up blank so I got on the case and found one quite quickly. The oil was topped up, the central heating was switched on and the house started it’s long thaw out. The cold was strange though, even on mild days it was freezing, the cold came up through the mattress of the bed, so even with three quilts on the bed you were still freezing. Typing at a computer proved a problem too, fingers got very very cold and fingerless gloves only went so far to getting the blood supply moving again.
The chimneys and the fires were next but they proved difficult too. Just booking in Sooty took a month of booking in advance. Once here Sooty spent three hours swearing at the first chimney he tackled taking out bags of rubble and finding out that all chimneys were capped. A roofer and some moula later and the chimneys were uncapped to have Sooty return to finish them off. It seems that my chimneys had been capped after having years of them being uncapped open to birds nesting in them. Once capped the nests had set like concrete and this proved my downfall when assuming I could have the chimneys up and running on the day the chimney sweep visited. The chimneys still sport problems, the upstairs rooms and attic get smoky when the fire in the living room is lit. So still some work needed there, carbon monoxide alarms a gogo. Still despite the smoke and the chirping of the alarms it’s now warm. I’m typing this in only two layers of clothing, I’m not wearing a hat or gloves and I feel I can tackle a bath without risking losing a finger in the process.
Actually on another note I was sat in my steaming bathtub one night admiring the greenness of the bathroom suite. All the while something was pricking at my memory and I wondered what it could be. Sinking underwater to rinse my hair it occurred to me “this is the bathroom suite out of the movie “The Shining”. I surfaced suitably spooked expecting to see a pair of young girls holding hands next to the tub. Eeek, anyway all work and no play doesn’t get the heating on.