Damp and other delights

Nov3

This spell of cold weather has made the whole house SWEAT! I've hd to put our central heating on at last, yay it still works, but uh-oh, this has led to condensation everywhere. Hopefully this will sort itself out when the temperature levels off a bit, will see. I'm a bit worried that condensation is an early sympton of potential damp...

The basement flat has apparently had some sort of damp issue, which has now crept into the flat on the ground floor, and we're on the second floor, for how much longer are we safe..? The full story is that the basement flat on this side of the building (rewind a bit, this is a big old building, split into two, then each again split into five, so ten flats in all, and two front doors, now carry on) negotiated himself the exclusive use of some storage rooms down in the basement, which in the neighbouring identical mirrored building are share between all the flats. now it seems this private storage room had a damp problem a few years ago, but basement flat owner didn't have the money to fix it, so left it. Now it's got out of hand and is going to cost thousands to put right. So there was a tenants meeting (we all own part of the freehold), which we didn't go to, but we did get a note asking what we thought about this, who should fix it, who should pay for it, maybe we the freehold company could lend the money to the flat owner, maybe we could take control of this basement room again. I wouldn't mind some extra external storage if it was right by the flat, but it being all the way down there, and also stinking with damp, it doesn't sound like such a good option to me. My suggestion was for the people involved to sort it out with their insuranace... Does that make me a bad neighbour? Ah well, it's at least one step up the niceness ladder from calling the council to complain about the damp health hazard.

UPDATE from neighbour we do actually speak to:

[basement flat owner] has managed to come up with some money to eradicate damp and he is dealing direct with contractor. He wishes to hang on to storerooms.

So that's that sorted then. Thanks for listening to all that, here are some illustrative pictures as a reward. First, a look at the back of our building, see the five flats. Well, the top four and about half of the basement flat. That basement flat doesn't have any front aspect at all, I wonder what it's worth? I did hear the guy only paid 15k for it at the time...



Next, while looking for a picture of the flat I found this one of a patch of damp in our flat in Stokey. I don't remember it being that unpleasant, did we just have a wildly different standard of living then or what?



I picked up a new experience today, my very first visit to a launderette, at the age of thirty-four. Wasn't too bad, I just needed a bigger machine to be able to fit our winter bedspread in. There seems to be only one laundrette in town, and it's pretty run down, but it wasn't that bad. Maybe we could do with one of those cool laundromat-cum-nightclub type setups, with DJ's and a bar and dancing on top of the machines in the evening. I raised this with Clare, but she won't let me cash in all the savings to invest in such a scheme.
Started my new book while waiting for the wash and dry, it's a Davinci Code style novel that is not released yet, not sure how much I can say about it, it's related to this new job that starts on Monday.

Lawks, that's the end of my spell of leisure then. Where did it go? I've wasted the last of my daytime TV opportunity by watching the latest episode of Dexter, and just about managed to hold off from the new Lost, better save that for when Clare gets in. Or rather, when we both get in, from our semi-regular night out at Keppel's bar tonight.

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