domestic woe

I'm so fed up with minor domestic hassles at the moment. It's exactly like one of those mole and hammer games - you bang one down and another pops up. After three visits from the electrician, hours spent on the phone to Nu heat and three separate thermostatic receivers being sent and rejected, the underfloor heating is working again - fingers crossed. The £550 we have spent wipes out any notional savings we might be making on gas bills, but by the end of it I'd have paid three times that just to get it working.

Then yesterday morning I put the tumble dryer on and the electricity meter started crackling again, with all the lights flickering away, just as it did a few months ago. I could have screamed! Instead I very calmly went to put the kettle on, only to discover that one of the swanky and thus difficult to replace under cabinet lights had gone. ( Having said that I pulled it out, poked about with the wires for a bit and then shoved it back in - it worked!)

My husband thinks we should get the electrician back to check out the meter issue but I just can't face it at the moment. The electrician is on first name terms with the whole family and our cleaner, but I think he could do with a break from us for a while. I have unplugged our OWL monitor just in case that was contributing to the problem (it had gone wrong anyway...!) I'm starting to wonder whether I should get EDF to look at the meter actually, seeing as it's 25 years old and I think 'belongs' to them as our electricity provider.

Oh and the automatic lights in the understairs cupboard have gone - the kids love looking for their shoes with a torch but I am less keen. They were £200 to put in, so I think I might wait and see what else goes wrong then get the electrician back to do a job lot...