Day Six: (Yet another) Unscheduled Hole

So, the building inspector did go round yesterday and he decided that there needed to be an extra inspection hatch on the drains other than the one that is going to be underneath the new kitchen floor. Fair enough, but it meant that the team spent most of today deciding where that was going to be and digging it out, as well as exposing the sewage pipe for the underfloor inspection hatch.



A couple of years ago a nice man from Southern Water came round and informed us that he'd been tracking "the largest mains water leak in Reading" for some time, and had narrowed the source down to the pipework beneath our house. His argument was fairly compelling. First, when he turned off the water supply and placed a full pint glass of water under our kitchen tap, the vacuum created sucked the entire glass down in about four seconds. And secondly, if you listened hard in the kitchen, you could actually hear the water gushing somewhere nearby... rather like a Japanese formal garden, but less relaxing. So we paid £300 to get a new "breakthrough" pipe drilled to the house. And thought nothing further of it.



Imagine our surprise this evening, therefore, to find that the new breakthrough pipe had actually been bored straight through the sewage pipe.

Blue pipe = water, Brown pipe = poo.


So tomorrow Ed will be getting on to Southern Water to find out what they intend to do about this. The donkeys.

It feels all rather as though the schedule is slipping slightly from the initial six week estimate (which, fortunately, we never really believed). The ultimate aim is to have it finished by Xmas, as Ed's mum is coming to stay with us for our first "proper" family Christmas at home.

The builder also mentionedthat the weather is due to be bad tomorrow so they don't think that they'll get a lot done... this was after telling Ed a "funny" anecdote where the back wall of one of the houses that they're working on literally fell in when the lady of the house leaned a ladder against it to climb up and paint the soffits. Fortunately the lady in question was unharmed, but the builders spent all weekend rebuilding her wall. (There is a technical reason why it fell down, and it's not actually as bad as it sounds, but it does sound quite bad!)

So a "meh" sort of day overall really.