It's mine! All mine, I tell you!

Well today I bunked off work early and headed off over to see Rapport and Money Man (Good & Bad Cops/Estate agents respectively), hopefully for the last time.

I dropped by to pick up my keys, to my house!

Unfortunately, they only had one set of keys, the other sets were with the other estate agency that had listed the property.

While I was there, Money Man called the other two estate agencies that had had boards outside the property. It turned out that one of the boards was actually there since the original owner had attempted to sell the property, prior to the repossession occurring. It turned out that she had put the property on the market for £450,000! The property just isn't worth that much money, so I'm guessing she was trying to reclaim some money on top of the value to pay of additional debts she had. Unlucky woman.

The rest of the evening was very rushed and a bit shit.

I collected all my power tools from storage, then headed off over to the other estate agency and collected the other two sets of keys, then headed off over to my new home.

To be honest it really felt like a real anti climax, in fact if anything, it was quite depressing. The stress of the journey to get this far has been so much, that finally getting to last stop on the line has been quite strange. I was so focused on making it here, that I had no idea what to do next, it had never even occurred to me that there was a next until I got here.

So with that in mind, I did a thorough search of the house, and tuned up a few manuals and guarantees for various items. I also tested everything that I could to see what had been reconnected and what was switched off.

The tests included turning on the tap in the en suite shower room, and flushing the toilet in there. Then I headed back to the kitchen to read the manuals that I had found. As I was reading the manual for the burglar alarm system, I heard a dripping noise behind me.

SHIT, SHIT, SHIT!

It seems that the en suite's toilet just seems to slowly empty onto the en suite's floor and from there to the kitchen ceiling and finally the kitchen floor, not the outside world via the typical route of plumbing!

I quickly flung my pullover and coat onto the floor, to make sure that the water didn't seep though the kitchen floor into my new neighbour's kitchen (Can you imagine: “Hi, I'm your new neighbour, sorry for flooding your kitchen!” Not a great introduction is it?), then went and knocked on their door, to see if I could borrow some towels, worse luck no one was in!

So I jumped in my car and drove like a loon (wrong way down one-way streets and the works) back to my other place and picked up a mop and bucket, and towels. Then I drove back (like a loon of course) with the new 'soaking up' equipment, only to find when I got there, that I had dropped the keys back at my other place! So this time, I drove more sedately (by now I'm assuming that an entire cistern's worth of water has fallen on my coat and pullover) and picked up the keys (cunningly dropped inside the front door of my flat) and headed back. Ten minutes later, the floor of the two rooms was reasonably dry.

At this point I continued with my intended mission for the evening (hence the tools I picked up from storage earlier in the evening), the mission was to tear out the old en suite shower enclosure (with a shattered door, but no maker's mark, so no hope of buying a replacement) and adding a new enclosure in its place.

So I jumped in the car (I'm having a premonition that I'm going to be doing a lot of driving over the next few days!) and headed off to B&Q to buy another enclosure and some sealant.

I could go into detail of the whole purchasing experience, but suffice to say, B&Q have some good staff, and B&Q have some right miserable old buggers working for them!

End result was that I got what I came for and transported it back to my new home. (Am I overdoing this emphasis? Heh.)

Then I set about tearing out the old enclosure, the blooding thing was clearly intended to be used as a safe room in the unexpected nuclear attack scenario. It took me more than two hours to get the thing off the wall, and at the end of it, I still had one of the 'U' shaped rails that attached the unit to the wall to go! The thing is glued on with something out of a Spiderman comic I swear! I decided to leave it until another day, I didn't want to take a hammer to it and wake up the neighbours (if they had returned). The last thing I want to do is introduce myself to the neighbour when he/she/it* turns up to explain I had woken their kid(s).

So here I am, a home owner, with a sense of impending doom, who has already flooded his new home and been beaten into submission by a stubborn shower enclosure... Hopefully tomorrow will be better day.


* This is London, I no longer make the assumption that a neighbour could be one of only two sexes. I'm not saying they are common here, but we do have our fair share of transvestites, pre and post op transsexuals, and no doubt more than a few post-humans, aliens and other assortments to boot. Live and let live say I, but don't make foolish assumptions.