Normal service now resumed...I hope!

Wow, that was a long pause! We had so many problems with the underfloor heating and electrics generally in the run up to Christmas and in all that snow that I sort of lost the will to blog, which is fairly unlike me.

The heating broke down two more times, including a week before Christmas, costing a further £250 to fix, before a friend of a friend who happens to be an electrician took a look at it all for me. Unlike all the other electricians I had been paying £75 an hour for he instantly spotted that the problem was nothing to do with the heating itself, but with the electrical supply coming in from EDF. Something to do with a neutral fault from the head. (No, me either!) But he had EDF in within the hour to replace the faulty part at no cost and (fingers firmly crossed!) no more problems have ensued. Apparently our electrical cables etc coming into the house date from the 1920s and will all need to be replaced, but that isn't urgent, unlike the neutral problem, which causes house fires if left untended. So we were officially living in a death trap. The moral of the story is that I should have called EDF straight away, but like most mortals I had no idea what to do, and neither did my lovely but entirely impractical husband.

We have a huge trench outside our house at the moment, dug by EDF but due to an entirely unconnected problem. We were plunged into darkness on Sunday evening ( just as I was about to place a particularly enormous and foolhardy online clothes order!) We didn't get power back until Monday at 11 pm, because only five houses were affected and we were therefore 'non-priority'. It was just like the old days of the build, putting the kids to bed with five layers on over their pyjamas and cooking by torchlight. Whenever we have a period of domestic discomfort we just have to remind ourselves of the months we slept in our bedroom on stilts for it all to seem ok. And EDF are going to give us £50 in compensation, which I might just have to redirect towards that clothes order!



And just to remind me, as we come up to 2 years in the finished (ish) house, of how far we've come: a picture of my daughter as as a 3 month old baby in the lean-to kitchen the week we moved in, and then as a toddler in the new extension!