We've had a hectic couple of weeks since we came home from the UK. The weather was very cold while we were over there, so when we got home we found the water pipes all frozen up and as we thawed them out several leaks showed up, including a couple where the ice had burst out of the side of the pipe like a dagger!
So we've been repairing them with new lengths of pipe and some sealing compound - 'epoxy putty' which is OK for some temporary repairs. We just have one final repair to do to replace a putty repair with a new piece of pipe now but all the water is functioning except the water softener, which had to be bypassed. The engineer is coming out to re-commission it this Wednesday.
However, whilst working on the water pipes the electric lights and power went off in the cellier - the outbuilding where the softener is situated. On testing it turned out that we had live mains voltage on both live and neutral wires so there is a short circuit in one of the linked cables. Unfortunately it's in a section of cable without any access and on doing more tests we discovered that the outbuildings are wired up in a somewhat unsafe manner so we've had to strip out all that wiring and make new connections, most of which is now all done. We just have one part where we have to run completely new cables into a section of the house that we've yet to renovate, so its not urgent but there is no light or heat there until we do.
So it's been a couple of weeks of unplanned work, that's set us back a bit from what we planned to do. However it all has to be done sometime so I guess its still progress of a sort.
We took the day off yesterday - Sunday - and had a day out with friends to St Georges de Didonne and a great lunch in Barzan, nearby. A beautiful sunny and reasonably warm day, and a nice break.
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