The Challenges of Home Ownership, Part 2: The Plumbing

And in case you missed the first part - the hilarious and heart-warming story of the pigeon which got stuck up our chimney - you can catch up here.

Monday was our 6-month anniversary in the new flat - I think it's safe to say that we feel pretty well at home here now (though it took longer than I thought it would), but one thing that has been the bane of our lives - and I can't believe we actually managed to put up with it for 6 months - has been the barely-functioning shower. The bathroom is small - when the flats were built, around 1902 - the bathroom, well toilet I should say, was in an outhouse out back. Anyway this means there is not much room and the vendors took out the bath and installed a shower cubicle - ie there is no other means of washing, apart from a flannel in the washbasin and water all over the floor. The bathroom was one of the last rooms the vendors did up before selling on the flat, and it is barely a year old - when I first saw the flat, it looked far too glamorous for us, with stone and tile and mirrors everywhere and a shower like you might expect to find in a 5-star hotel.

They warned us about the fact that when you turn it on, you have to run it for a goodly while before enough water started to flow to actually shower in. To start with this meant running it for about 10 minutes, but gradually it got worse, meaning we often needed to leave it running for half an hour before enough water was flowing to wash in. I hated the waste of water. And even once it did start flowing, it kept cutting to a heavy flow of cold water, which meant you had to leap out of the way and squeeze into the corner of the cubicle, until it started flowing warm again. For a while this was preceded by a noise in the pipes - an increase in pressure or something I suppose - which forewarned you that the cold was coming, a bit like the noise the Fireswamp makes in The Princess Bride before it incinerates you.

Basically after a few months of this, the hot water stopped flowing all together and turned into a dribble, which alternated with a heavy flow of cold water. For a moment when the hot dribble turned into cold flow or vice versa there would be a flow of hot water, for about a millisecond, which is when you could rinse shampoo or conditioner from your hair - though I am not sure it ever really got properly wet!

And that is how we have been washing ourselves for the last few months, often ending up leaving late for work as it has taken so long to have a shower in the morning. And this is not for want of trying to get it fixed. The most frustrating thing about it all has been the difficulty of getting a plumber to come and look at it, to diagnose the problem, and of course we had no clue - the frustration of learning what you don't know about when you own a place... I made contact, one way or another, with about 5 different plumbers, got 5 different opinions on what the problem was, made arrangements to come and look at it which were never honoured. I learnt that the good plumbers don't need to call you back, because they have no shortage of work. The recommendation from our old neighbour Sue of Martin the Polish Plumber eventually paid off - but having called, texted and emailed, when I finally succeeded in speaking to him, he was about to head to Poland for the summer!

In the end, he was here until 10pm last night, and touch wood, it now seems to be working. You turn the shower on and - miracle of miracles! - water comes out and it's hot and it keeps coming out and it stays hot! The problem was differential pressures for the hot water (coming from the mains) and the cold water (coming from a tank in the roof), and he tried a series of things until one of them worked. Counter-intuitively a pressure-reducing valve for the hot, to try to level out the pressure - and then simplest of all solutions, installing a brand-new shower and tap which were suited for low water pressure. It seems the vendors had installed high pressure taps.

Sorry to go on about this, but it has been a real nightmare, and stupidly difficult to get sorted out! But hopefully normal life can now resume, and we can turn our thoughts to all the other things we want to do in the flat that we haven't been thinking about with the part of our brains consumed by shower frustration - like putting up some pictures!

The Challenges of Home Ownership, Part 1: The Pigeon in the Chimney

As you can see from the title I am anticipating that there will be other challenges as well. But this is one we didn't expect.

We came home from our now rather-too-regular Friday evening post-work/week drink at Mango Landin' to discover a large pile of crumbled fire brick filling the living room fireplace and spilling out onto the carpet in front. Odd we thought, but it had been a bit windy so perhaps something had got dislodged in the chimney and fallen down the stack onto our carpet. A bit annoying, but we hoovered it up and thought nothing more of it.

Coming home again on Saturday evening - this time after a long, exhausting and extremely expensive shopping spree in High Street Kensington to buy clothes, toiletries, medical supplies and other sundries for our upcoming trip - there was another little pile of chimney detritus in the fireplace, this time with a few small feathers scattered over the top. And some birdshit.

Hmm. Odd, we thought again. But hoovered it up... And then K found a torch in one of our semi-unpacked boxes and stuck it up the chimney. There, just a little way up, is a ledge, where the flue from our fireplace connects with the chimney stack. And there, on the ledge, was a pigeon. We decided to call it Petunia.

What to do? Googling 'How to get a pigeon out of your chimney' turns up a variety of hilarious home videos on YouTube, whose advice - in the end - we had to fall back on, because Lambeth Council had no interest in coming out at a weekend, and a private company we called, who claimed to have a 30 to 90 minute rapid response time and no call-out fee, told us they didn't handle incidents involving single birds. If we had a whole family of pigeons up our chimney that would have been fine.

K tried with a poke to encourage the pigeon down off the ledge and into the living room - having previously opened all the windows wide - but this didn't succeed in doing what it was meant to, and just traumatised the poor bird. Having waited until Sunday morning to call Lambeth Pest Control - which someone had told us might respond on a Sunday, only to discover that no, try again on Monday, which was clearly unhelpful - K pondered for a while and came up with a new tactic involving a colander and a cardboard box. It may have been the same colander that he used to catch the family of mice that plagued us while we were renting Yamin's flat in Catford. Poor K - he gets all the duff jobs.

Method: gently insert colander into chimney flue (K) while holding cardboard box in front of fireplace (M). Place colander over bird and pull it out of chimney and into cardboard box. Fold down leaves of box lid. Hold tight while carrying box outside into front garden. Gently open box to lower pigeon onto ground, in case wings are damaged from colander treatment or it's weak from 3 days in a chimney. Stand back in amazement while pigeon powers up up and away, not able to get away fast enough.

Only problem is that clearly the top of the chimney is uncapped and it may happen all over again at any time. We're just hoping that it doesn't happen again while we're in Central Asia!

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And talking of which - we're off tonight!!!! We're leaving the flat in an hour to head to Heathrow, arriving in Tashkent tomorrow morning. Neither of us can quite believe it yet, but I guess it will hit us pretty quickly! For the last week or so we've both been having conversations with people that go something like:

M/K: "I'm off on holiday next week."

Friend/colleague: "Oooh, where are you going?"

M/K: "Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran."

Friend/colleague (slightly nervously): "Oooookaaaay...." Then realises we're serious. "Wow - exotic!"

I think it will be the trip of a lifetime. So watch this space around the beginning of May, after we get back, for a full report! Until then - Happy Easter!