Breakdowns and Buses

Do they always have to come in threes? My shower no longer heats the water and having Epilepsy I have to be supervised in the bath so I can only have on on an evening and I will not have a cold shower, bring on the deodorant!! The heating element on our washer-drier went a few months ago but we just used an airer and the radiators and then last night we noticed that the drum wasn't spinning on the wash cycle. So I looked through the manual and followed all the fault finding and that didn't help. So I have had to purchase an insurance plan and they are coming to repair it tomorrow morning and luckily mum and dad have the week off and will sit in my house and wait for the engineer. So I'm waiting for the third thing now.

Our local council have been installing free cavity wall and loft insulation in every home in the district which is great and they came to do ours last Friday. Unfortunately we had to pull the gas cooker out for them to improve a vent that was behind it. I have never pulled the cooker out before and ugh! It took me ages to clean it. Now, I work in the gas industry and seeing our gas pipe (the green pipe) has me worried. It is embedded in the wall when it should be held free of the wall with clips to prevent corrosion. It is suffering heavily from verdigris and is corroded in some areas.

I do like my house but had I worked in this industry when I first viewed it I would never have bought it. It's a mid terrace stone and brick house built in 1900. The central heating system is 35 years old and even though it works fine it is inefficient and we can't make any cosmetic improvements to the house until the big messy jobs are done. So that's the old system and immersion heater ripping out, new copper piping all over the house and like everything else the price has soared recently, new rads and a boiler. The electrics are as old as the heating so they need totally replacing. New kitchen and bathroom are really needed and the solid floor is really uneven in the kitchen and needs leveling, unless it's stone in which case we'll just pretty it up but I have a feeling it will be concrete. And then of course every room has yukky raised pattern wallpaper that will probably be hiding cracked uneven walls and after having the electrics done there will probably be several holes that need covering. Hopefully being an old house there will be conduits running to the light switches for the cables and we wont need to chip the walls out. So yeah, re plaster every room and then we can get on with the cosmetic side of things, that's the bit I will enjoy.

Last night James and I were so miserable, it was just getting on top of us, we work 80 hours a week between us and have no money, it hardly seems fair. We can't afford a car and James travels for two hours each way on the bus to work so he is hardly at home and when he is things like this happen. We both need a holiday I think, just time off work. I shouldn't complain really because there are so many people worse off than us, at least I have a home and a job!!