Saturday 10 December 2022
We have heating at the push of a button and the house is warm for the first time. We both knew the cold was getting to us but the glee at hot – not tepid, not warm; hot – radiators was far more exciting than either of us could have expected. All radiators have been repeatedly stroked and duly admired for their heat-producing prowess. Unfortunately, that meant no essential, warming vegetable curry-in-a-huggable-bowl followed by whisky and chocolates while wrapped up in woolly blankets … hmm, what fools, we should have had a celebratory curry, whisky and chocolates instead.
Everything else yesterday was overshadowed by the anticipation of hot radiators. The plumber is our very favourite person (and he was indeed very friendly and helpful).
Thanks to the plumber (sort of), I have now sanded and painted two layers of undercoat on a previously orangey-brown veneered wooden bedframe. I felt on-edge yesterday, I never feel comfortable going about my business when someone is working in the house. I’m also too easily distracted to work when there are new noises around me, especially as my still-deskless study is the room with the water tank above. I ended up partially monitoring the online auction (we ‘won’ three of our ten bids, including the glorious spice rack), which went on all day. I sorted some of my boxes and piles of stuff into my new unit but I got too cold to stay in my study (even colder with the roof hatch open for the plumber’s access to the water tank).
Then our paint delivery arrived and I just sort of started sanding the varnish off the bedframe, and next thing I know I’m painting the grey undercoat. It’s 08:26 now and, instead of tending the [expletive] fire, I have this morning painted the last side of the bed with its second coat.
Returning to the heating issue, there was one thing the plumber told us that really annoyed/infuriated/upset me. He said that a ‘tap’ thing on one of the pipes had been, I imagine, knocked, so was essentially off. He apologised for not having noticed it when he came round to do an assessment last weekend. There is a pipe that takes hot water up into the tank, which was usually hot in the stove-burning weeks. There is, unbeknownst to us, a pipe that then comes down with hot water, ready to disperse heat to all the radiators. That is the one that was off, allowing the pipe merely to warm up a bit. So it means that the fire probably was generating enough heat (once I realised the fire needed to be a lot bigger than it was for the first few days) to power the radiators. The plumber only noticed it when he did the big switch-on of the electric boiler and couldn’t work out why it was heating but not circulating. The thing that got me most about that was all that effort to get the fire going, the coal water all over the utility room floor, coal dirt everywhere, lifting 25kg bags of coal, coal-dyed hands and finger nails, stoking the fire, cleaning out the fire; it would all have paid off and resulted in hot radiators had we known about one crucial tap-thing being turned off. The stoking of the fire did at least result in hot water (but we also had, and still have, an electric immersion for hot water).
But, we do now have push-button heat. We also have an understanding of how cold some people’s houses probably are all the time because of the cruel cost of energy and I suppose it’s good to have an opportunity to appreciate what you have, namely easy heat.
Today’s plan is to go to Carlisle, though Chris has to be home by about four for a work thing. I am going to have a quick walk around the ‘block’, which I’d like to do as regularly as possible. It gives me a really good idea of the weather and condition of the roads and it’s absolutely beautiful out there, especially with the frost that is on top of the dusting of snow from two nights ago.
