Had my sick day disturbed by a knock at the door, someone wanted to start fitting some wall insulations. It's not some scam, which would always be my first thought, this has been ongoing on the estate for a year or so now and finally come round to us. These houses were pretty shoddily built by all accounts, every corner cut along the way. The company that originally built them has gone bust but being less than ten years old they're still covered by some guarantee so everything is still covered. We have not noticed any issues in the year we've been here, but some of the houses had lots of problems with leaks and damp and so on. During the works they had done, the original shortcuts came to light and someone took the decision to just revisit all of the houses. It's very hard to tell if the insulation in the house is up to spec, but based on other properties that have been fully investigated, it's safest to assume not. So we're going to get a load of new insultation blasted in soon.
No-one actually fitted insulation today, but they needed to fit some new trim to the underside of windowsills so the insulation doesn't all spurt out when they pump it in.
The guy doing the work told me all the horror stories of what they've found in houses and flats further along the street, but we don't seem to have suffered any of that here. Maybe the original builders started off OK but skimped more and more as they built along the estate - number one was the show house, they built along from there, and we are number seven, so would have been one of the first houses. Lots of the others have needed walls and ceilings taking down. We don't, shame really, that would be a prime opportunity to run all the new cables I want...
The work's been done now, with minimal interruption to my day in front of the TV (which I'm feeling a lot better for).
In other property news, that I don't think I've posted here, we got a note through the door to say that the street has now been adopted by the council, which is good news, and there's a planning application for some more houses... Right at the entrance to Alexandra Corniche there is a block of four or five garages, that don't seem to belong to any of the houses. We got another notice through the door to say the owner of them has applied for permission to build four houses on the plot. They'll be small houses, and it doesn't seem a great time to be building new places here to me, but I don't think it'll be a problem to us. I say not a great time to be building, as there's a house very like ours1 for less than we paid a year ago, and this four bedroom version2 for a similar price. We have some extra features that push the value up (well I have to say that don't I) but prices do not quite seem to be on the up yet... Last link, here's one like ours3 but where they have another bedroom where we have a garage. They have a garage on the side though, if we converted we'd obviously have no garage left.
Back to the TV now, I'm watching Nick Knowles Original Features which is good solid daytime viewing.
Paul Clarke's blog - I live in Hythe in the far South. Wed to Clare + dad to two, I'm a full-stack web engineer, + I do js / Node, some ruby, other languages etc. I like pubbing, parkrun, eating, home automation and other diy jiggery-pokery, history, genealogy, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.