Various people I know have had bad experiences with
water over the last year or so, resulting in nasty brown patches on ceilings
and a general sense of unease about water tanks in the loft. My anxiety
about this has finally overruled my reluctance to spend money I can't afford,
so I'm replacing my perfectly good boiler (it's only 25 years old, for goodness
sake, and only makes really worrying noises when it first comes on) with
a new combi-boiler.
So today, while I've been at work, the engineer has
drained all the water from the system and removed the immersion tank from the
airing cupboard. This has given me loads more storage space, but nowhere
to dry my knickers. I can live with that; I'll just need a bit more
forward planning. And more knickers.
He can't remove the (now thankfully empty) tank
from the loft, as it's too big to go through the hatch - it must have been
installed when the house was being built, before the roof went on. Since
pretty well everyone I know is also too big to go through the hatch as well,
it's not a problem, because I won't be storing anything up there. When I
bought extra rolls of insulation three years ago we only just managed to push
them up through the hole. They've stayed there, rolled up, ever
since, in the hope that one day I'd meet someone small and co-operative who'd
be prepared to ascend into the upper regions and sort them out. I'd have
done it myself, only I'm too short and weak to pull myself up from the top of
the stepladder and, even if I could get up there, I'd be too much of a woos to
jump down again.
So tonight I have a beautiful new boiler that isn't
connected up yet, so no hot water and, more importantly, no heating. I
can't get to my wardrobe to put on more clothes, as my bedroom is full of stuff
that had to be moved out of the spare room, in order for the engineer to reach
the loft hatch and the airing cupboard. I can't even get to my bed
easily, so I shall now remove my gloves and migrate to a warmer place for the
night.
