This weekend, Joe & I thought it would be a great idea to finally get some stuff on the walls of the lounge. Pictures of the family and a canvas that we have. After all, we placed our blinds on order last weekend (blog post to follow on these when they arrive woohoo! No more nosey neighbours looking in on us!) so we thought, why not get the finishing touches done now?
This involved a simple job of screwing in the tie-backs for the curtains on the back window. Simple, it was not.
There’s a phrase that Joe likes to use: “We are so bloody unlucky” – I don’t think he means it in an ungrateful kind of way. But with this kind of stuff, we do tend to get in a pickle a lot. For example, with post, I am terribly unlucky. More often than not, stuff I send will be lost, and stuff sent to me takes weeks. Next day delivery does not exist in my world. But that’s another story altogether. Really boring. No-one wants to read about that…
Anywho, Joe and I started with the tie back. This was another Christmas present off Joe’s parents alongside the curtains (thanks again you two!) The first one went up a treat.
We get to the second one on the left hand side, and we hit something.
When Joe drilled a hole for the screws, water suddenly started spurting out of the wall and trickling down onto our brand new carpet, down our fresly plastered and painted walls.
Joe looked something like this…
After pulling up the carpet, unplugging the nearby electrics, scurrying for towels and quickly legging it to the other side of the house to turn off the boiler and water, we grabbed a bucket for the hole and rang Joe’s dad (no matter how old you get, parents are always the wisest people at hand) and our plumber.
When we had the central heating installed after we bought the house, we discovered that the floors downstairs were not floorboards like normal (although there were floorboards present – very confusing), but it was concrete. This wasn’t a major problem but did mean we had to install the piping for the radiators in the walls as opposed to under the floor. We, of course, forgot about this and drilled straight into the pipes.
To be honest, I don’t think we could have aimed for the pipes better if we were actually trying! Typical!
As you can see, we had to chisel into our new plaster (sad face!) to expose the plastic casing. Then Joe cut into the plastic to expose the pipes. After instruction from our plumber, he cut the pipe in two and connected them again with a coupler (which took a whole afternoon to find!).
It could have been a whole lot worse and a lot more damage could have been done, but I know that if we want anything hanging on the walls from now on, perhaps we could do with some supervision.
Next job on the to-do list, is re-plaster and paint this hole. Darnit.
Karen x
