We've had the builders in. Briefly.



Just like the ex wife's haircut

 We've got a bit of an archaeological dig going on at our apartment building at the moment, you know, the kind that never seems to be finished. Unfortunately, it's in the entrance hall of our apartment building, which is undergoing something of a transformation; from a perfectly serviceable reception area with lighting and post-boxes into a derelict building site with rubble, bags of cement piled up and bare live wires everywhere. The drilling, banging and dust creation began in the middle of January, carried on at a relentless pace for three days and then abruptly stopped. I'm assuming, maybe wrongly, the workmen must have knackered themselves that first week because they just haven't come back. What they've left behind is an absolutely hideous mess with no end to the chaos seemingly in sight. At the outset, their remit was to remove and replace ageing wall and floor tiles, lighten up the space, install a new intercom system and hang a new security door out to the street. Only half of one of those things has actually happened so far, but the fifteen or twenty new tiles on the wall aren't half a lovely colour and I'm sure the ceiling will look nice once the awful looking holes in the plaster contain spotlights.

You're supposed to put  letters in here mate

In the meantime, we and our neighbours, one of whom is quite elderly, have to navigate something akin to  the shop floor of  a branch of Travis Perkins to get to our front door. Even if we make it safely home, we may well resmble ghostly spectres and require an immediate shower, such is the quantity of dust we accumulate on the way up. As I once said to the ex wife when passing comment on her new hairdo, "it'll be nice when it's finished" What I am quite excited about is the possibilities of our postman acutally inserting our mail into the promised shiny new buzones, (postboxes - pronounced boo-thon-es), up until recently he just sort of lobbed people's letters in the vague direction of the stairs and left the residents to get on with a bit of a treasure hunt for their bills. Talking of archaeology, had Robeto the builder and his feckless chums used toothbrushes and spoons instead of hammers and a Black and Decker, the job might be nearly finished by now. Closer to home though - in actual fact inside my home - the story of apparently started and abandoned building projects looms very large, as well our once immaculate bathroom can now testify.

The ugly scar

The problem, not for one moment of our own making, started last weekend with a knock on the door from Jose, owner of the apartment beneath ours, who, it seemed was suffering from an ingress of water, from quite where nobody really knew. The local plumbers did though and very soon narrowed the problem down to a leaking pipe - inconveniently situated behind a wall in our salón de baño. Upon this diagnosis I immediately, and not without good reason, sensed trouble. Trouble duly came next morning, when, once the insurance company had given the green light, Pepe the Spanish plumber and his oppo set about the offending wall with gusto and two sledgehammers. Two hours, a pile of rubble and a massive great hole later, they'd located and replaced the offending leaky pipe, made a token effort to clean up after themselves and gone. That was last Monday and they've not been back. Discreet enquiries revealed it's now up to a new set of, err, "tradesmen" to make good the massive great gash the plumber left behind which stretches from half way up the wall to the ceiling and gets wider at the top. It looks like the kind of fissure in the rock potholers in Derbyshire might enjoy exploring. The thing is when I visit the bog with my newspaper or a good read, I don't want to have to do so with a helmet and safety lamp. More to the point it's most disconcerting to have the feeling something has just crawled out of the earth and is sneaking up behind me while I take part in one of lifes simple pleasures. 

It's not all gloom and doom though, on Friday my new and long awaited telephone finally arrived.


UPDATE FRIDAY MARCH AT ABOUT 2330
At long last progress and an impressive finished product to boot. After something of a frustrating two or three days because the newly cut security door keys wouldn't work properly without pulling or pushing the door itself, the entrance hall to our building has now been finished and looks mighty tidy. These days we now have spotlights in the ceiling, slinky floor and wall tiles and a brand new intercom system from the street to each individual apartment, which, presently doesn't work!! On the upside, the athletics theme continues uninterrupted. Previously, during the building process I used to have hurdle various builders requisites to get home, now the task is altogether simpler; the street door has a heavy spring mechanism, which, affords a competitive bloke me about thirteen seconds to sprint up the four longish flights off stairs before it clangs shut behind me. Great for keeping fit, but now, unfortunately, every flight of stairs I encounter has to be tackled at the double whatever I am wearing or carrying. Ho hum!!

That's only half the job though,  because Wookey Hole in our bathroom is still wide open and making an alarming noise