We’re having the bathroom tiled. By a very nice man called Harvey, and a friend of his who’s name I don’t know. I felt quite guilty yesterday as I’d stuck around at home to let him in and explain a bit about what we wanted, and I was still back home from work long before he left. Apparently our walls are so crooked and bent that they are a nightmare for tilers. Wallpaper, it seems, covers a multitude of sins bent walls wise. You can’t blame the wall though, they’re almost 200 yrs old by all accounts.

Our meager contribution to all this hard work (except for pay of course) was to strip the wallpaper off the top half of the walls and the ceiling, and repaint the ceiling, which we completed this weekend without too much hassle. The lintel above the window was rotten and collapsed a bit but you know, these things happen.

In order to paint the ceiling we thought it sensible to remove the light fitting (one of those space-station, halogen, chrome type things). Unfortunately on replacing it we found that the rest of the upstairs lights no longer worked. The bathroom light, newly replaced, worked a treat shedding a pleasing clean light over our wallpaperless walls, but as for the bedroom, study and landing ... nothing.

We had a similar problem at christmas this year and had to call a guy out to fix it, but this time I thought I’d try myself. So early this morning, having eaten and generally got as ready for work as possible, I switched off the electrics and got out the ladder and tried again. I wasn’t quite sure what to do, but the electrician as christmas had said it was all down to a loose wire in the bathroom fitting. So off that came. I poked around a bit but nothing seemed loose, so rather optimistically back on it went.

I trekked back down to the basement and flicked the electrics back on, and trudged back up and tried the bathroom light. Still working. And the landing? Nothing!

So I went back down and turned it all off again and came back up and removing the light fitting again. This time (for want of something to actually change) I removed an earth wire, twiddled it a bit with some pliers and replaced it. Then I bent the live wires back up to the right away from the rest just incase they had been touching. I fixed everything back up and rather dejectedly went back down to turn the electrics back on. I came back up and this time tried the landing light first ... it worked! Bathroom? Yes! Study? Yes! Bedroom .... flicker ... eeeek! ... no it’s OK the bedroom one always flickers, it’s one of those energy saving bulbs, look now it’s coming on! I did it! Woohoo!

There was hugs all round and a great sense of relieve. Kirsty (having great faith in me) had already started searching for the electricians number in the phone book!