Thursday, February 16, 2012

The water issue might have solved itself.

And for several different reasons too.

If you see that icicle in the photo here that I took a week or so ago (the weather was nothing like that today of course) it started to melt today. And so I simply stuck a bucket underneath it.

Meantime, I took one of those plastic drinks bottles, the type with a very long pointed neck, and cut the bottom off. Then I stuffed a load of fine fibreglass mesh up the neck. Each time a bucket was filled, I poured it through my home-made filter into one of these proprietary jug filters and let it filter through there, and then I decanted it into my water container. I managed to capture about 40 litres over the course of the afternoon and that's eased the situation considerably.

However like most things, solutions don't come on their own. Like London buses, after you've been waiting for hours, three turn up all at once. And so it is with this? By the end of the afternoon the water butt had started to unfreeze itself. Not that that's a quick solution, because I looked inside the rear tank and that's a frozen mass of ice, but I still managed 5 litres out of there as well.

And the third solution? Well, after all the freezing weather that we've had just recently, it's p155ing down outside. All the snow will be gone by tomorrow if it carries on like this, and then we will be in the floods again and we'll be having a different kind of water problem.

Despite a constant stream of interruptions today, I've now started on the final row of the tongue-and-grooving in the bedroom. That involved finishing off the previous row, moving piles of stuff around the room, and then mixing some polyfilla to fill in the joins between the wood and the insulation that is already in the ceiling. Maybe if I have a decent day tomorrow I can crack on with this. It would be nice to have it finished for the weekend. One thing that has helped is that this row is by far the narrowest of them. When I've been doing the other rows and cutting down lengths of tongue-and-grooving, I've always been left with leftover bits that wouldn't fit anywhere. I've been labelling them with the size, and these are all fitting into the row that I'm doing now. This will save me a load of time cutting up full-size lengths.

For tea tonight I had ratatouille, green beans and baked potatoes. This time the potatoes were done properly and it was one of the nicest meals I've had for ages. It was definitely a good plan to move the kitchen up here for the duration.

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