andrewducker | My week

Well, after the insurers told me I was covered and that they'd talk to the builders (last Friday) I heard nothing until Tuesday, at which point I phoned then to ask what was going on. "Oh," they said, "we told the builders. Did they not contact you? Here's their phone number."

So I spoke to the builders direct who said "We sent you an invoice for the £100 excess. Have you not got it yet?" so I waited until I got home to check. Which was stupid, as I should have just paid it on the phone right there. Instead I ended up paying it the next day, at which point I got an appointment for work to start. On the 12th. In two weeks time.

Cue one quick phone call to the loss adjusters. "You are aware that there is a leak in my ceiling, right? And that with every day the damage spreads? And that you will have to pay for said damage?"

So I got a phone call back today from the builders, offering to be round on Monday afternoon instead. Much better.

There's also debate as to whether the damage to the outside wall is covered, but the loss adjuster's going to pop round and take a look, and didn't seem averse to the idea.

In other news, the people who handle ducker.org.uk (the domain name, not the hosting company themselves) managed to not send me an invoice for the renewal. Which meant I got cut off at some point this morning. I phoned them, was as polite as I could be, and got it paid, but goodness knows if any email has been lost in the last couple of hours. Let's hope not (although it may take a while to arrive).

All of this has also added up to a fair chunk of stress, which meant that I finally passed out at 1am and then woke up at 7am, to sneak into the living room and leave Julie snoring. Today is thus full of tiredness. We did get a bunch of tidying doen last night though, which was good. Although we also failed to find any of the stuff necessary for Dreams of Steam, so we'll be skipping this one (Sorry Roy!) and going to the next one instead. Frankly, my stress levels are putting me off going to new events right now anyway.

Apologies to people that haven't seen me for a bit, I've mostly been feeling like hiding under the duvet and pretending the world doesn't exist... This should life over the next couple of weeks as we get the various problems around the flat sorted, and I eventually hope to be back to my normal self. Julie has, thankfully, been terribly supportive of my stress (while I've also been supportive of her PhD stress), and we've been emotionally equivalent to a pair of tired drunkards, propped up against each other in a rather unlikely structure that fails to collapse through sheer comedy value. God I hope this is over soon...

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Are you sure a night away from it all to chat to friends and have drinks wouldn't help get rid of stress? Personally, I find heading to the pub to destress is a great plus. I am treating tonight with the same outlook.

I am curious - why exactly do you find this all so stressful? In fact - what is 'stress' anyway .... how would you define it? An emotional cocktail of fear and powerlessness? Both of those succumb to action - which you are taking, and as a result of your actions, Stuff is getting Done. So no worries, right?

Clearly not, but why not?

IMO, things are always breaking or needing improvement or needing to be done to a time limit - that's just life. Not a great deal of point being stressed. Very rarely will the 'defects' or failure to meet time limits kill or injure you - but cumulative stress just might!

a) Stuff has not been getting done because of other people. I bring in my insurers, who spend 3 weeks failing to decide if I am covered. I go back to the builders who take two weeks to find a leaking pipe.
b) Meanwhile I'm living in a flat that's massively cramped, as it has all of mine and Julie's stuff stacked in one room rather than set u properly in two, all of our clothes are stored away bar about a week's worth that we have space to get out, stuff is literally peeling off the front of the building, and we can't clean properly because there's barely enough space to even get the hoover into the living room, let alone properly clean it.
c) I still don't know exactly what I'm going to have to pay for myself, and we are already living frugally because Julie's grant runs out in January and her PhD will take months longer to finish.

So the mixture of horrible living conditions, dependency on other people and lack of cash (and certainty about cash) is what's stressing me. If I could just stop being stressed I would :->

Also, that this has been going on for two months now.

The alternative to other people is you. Find it yourself, fix it yourself. I know this is a choice that you did not make (and for reasons which no doubt make sense) - but it was a choice and that choice was yours. So now, Stuff is Getting Done at the pace of the option you chose - which is slower than you expected. Maybe the best you can hope for at this point is to use that data for use in future decisions.

hmm, strikes me as a system whereby you just pay to get it fixed and claim back might have some merit in terms of getting the job done faster - but open to taking even longer to get the money back.

Clutter, yeh, I don't much like it myself in not-amenable-to-logic ways. My flat is ridiculously crowed but that's because I fix things and build/make things in it. I see that as a choice I made when I decided I'd rather not have a huge mortgage. I still have my moments of shed-envy! Sympathy.

I can't/won't comment on the cash uncertainty as I have no idea what the bill might run to, or on your finances (nor would I want to, in the latter case). I find personally, that I have always seemed to manage, somehow, so I suppose that's just not a stress factor I have ever really had, even when I had next to no money (thankfully not the case at present). I suppose I think/feel/was brought up to fit my life well within my budget - no matter how small that budget was/is. You, also, have (as far as I can tell) always managed to manage, so I don't suspect there is any need to actually worry all that much. But what do I know. You could be 50K in debt for drugs and loose women with nasty men calling round at all hours :-)

Perhaps there is some element of you not liking the results of your choices (moves in the game) and your brain trying, in the background, to analyse/optimise - and all that activity makes you jumpy/wakeful/twitchy/whatever.

Find it yourself, fix it yourself.
Become an expert at fixing wet rot, dry rot, replacing joists, injecting damp proof, replacing decomposing concrete and plastering? When I'm paying money on a constant basis for protection for my home so that someone else will sort it? Chances are that I wouldn't get all of those things right first time - which would mean I'd _still_ have rot under my floors, or joists that weren't actually supporting the floor, or concrete that would fall off the outside of the building. I can't see how that's even approaching good advice.

Money isn't an issue in general - it's tight, but livable. The problem is that fixing this problem had been costed at thousands of pounds that I don't have. So I had an unknown sum of money hanging over my head - and uncertainty about how to deal with it (or even whether I was going to have to) was getting to me.

And I could cope with normal clutter - I like things to have a certain level of clutter. Piles of belongings 5 foot high all over the place and the inability to get at most of my clothes, on the other hand, is incredibly annoying.

I have learned two things though:
1) Go direct to the insurance company first, rather than forgetting that I have insurance for the first three weeks.
2) Once you know who the insurance company's preferred builders are, use them to do the investigative work, as this will speed things up, and make claiming back invoices easier.

Can't comment on Andy's specific situation, but I work full time in a similar role and have an old house which has been full of nasty surprises, so I have some sympathy.

Fact is, there are some things that you can't do yourself (rot, damp, woodworm), because when you come to sell it, you won't have the relevant certificates to prove you've dealt with it, but the evidence that it has occurred may still be there.

Is this a kind of protection racket? What happens if you are someone who is officially sanctioned/qualified to deal with these things - are you allowed to DIY and self-certificate, or do you have to employ a third party?

I'm not sure.

For some things it does feel a bit like a protection racket.

While I understand the need for things like chimney certificates, electrical certificates etc., when I've had to have work done recently, the amount of labour that went into getting these documents was totally out of proportion to the amount paid to get them.

Particularly galling were the electrical certificates for the kitchen, since T's an electronics engineer, which is how we discovered that the 'qualified electrician' was next to useless...

Fancy staring at goats sometime this weekend?

Not planning anything in this weekend - as it is we're going out to Absynth, and I have mindfulness on Sunday. Booking in more stuff would just lead to more stress at the moment.

Thanks though :->

I may well have a weekend of setting up the mac.
Let's keep a goat-based trip pencilled in for some vague point in the future, such as next week or next weeked? Week after I'm away.

Give me until Monday for work to start and my stress levels to drop and we can arrange something then :->

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