Taking stock

This was going to be R’s last day here before he had to go back to his lonely vigil.  We tried to take stock of the house as well as doing as much unpacking as possible.  A few things became immediately apparent.

a) The kitchen had to go immediately.  It had looked sort of alright on Rightmove, but on closer examination I reckon it was the same one as my Mum had in the mid-80s.

The cooker seemed hardly to have been used – but was the most useless cheap piece of rubbish I have come across in 50 years of cooking.  The hob took forever to heat up and cool down and the grill only had one temperature – on or off.  I didn’t even know grills like this existed.

b) The mirrored wardrobes in three of the upstairs bedrooms had to go as well.

c) We needed more work done on the bathrooms than I had expected, as the only shower upstairs was basically non-functional

d) The wallpaper in the lounge needed to come off and the room redecorated before it fell off of its own volition.

The only good news in all of this was that the survey from Timberwise visited and informed us that a potential damp problem in the downstairs sitting room seemed to have resolved itself, at least for the time being, and that the spraying for woodworm in the loft, which we had known about, was going to cost no more than had been in the original survey 18 months previously.  I was pretty pleased about this, because I had estimated £10,000 in the budget for this and in fact it was only £3000.