I finally got round to getting
my various damaged floors (
and this one from even longer ago) repaired this week. Well, you know, got round to paying some men to come and repair them. My DIY skills, although impressive (
as this entry clearly shows) do not quite extend to anything that involves fixing, making or laying something (
although I have built a tiny fraction of a patio, so maybe all isn't lost).
But it seems when you get workmen round one job always leads to another (after all one of the floors needs repairing as a result of a crack in a wall from even longer ago - see how these things multiply and also drag on if you are disorganised and flaky like me). The floor men had had to disconnect my toilet to get the new floor down, but they were not insured to put it back in again, so today I had to wait in for a plumber to do that for me. He was meant to turn up between 9 and 12, but keen to adhere to the stereotype of his trade he finally showed up about 3pm. Which was anoying as I had wanted to go out and play tennis this morning and the weather had been fine, but the minute he finished his toileting work (and I don't believe these two things are directly connected) it began to rain. And it was 4pm and another day was wasted.
The plumber had also plumbed my washing machine back in (something I am capable of doing and which I successfully achieved when I bought the thing, but evenso I felt that as I had him here I might as well get my money's worth) I flushed the toilet and looked at the washing machine and all seemed fine, so I paid him his money and he was off on his way to be three hours late for wherever he was going next. But then I tried to turn the washing machine on and found out it wasn't working. None of the lights were coming on. This probably wasn't the plumber's fault and no doubt something had happened when the floor men shifted the machine in order to lay the floor.
I had seemingly entered a never-ending cycle of having to call out workmen. No doubt the washing machine man would come round and somehow smash all the flooring up and the process will have to start again.
The only way out of this was to repair the problem myself. That would in no way lead to more problems. And I was pretty certain that the complication would be a minor one, like maybe a switch that had been turned off at the back or something. For half an hour I fretted around trying different to put the plug in different plug holes and using different extensions, but nothing worked and short of opening the machine up and prodding around in it with a piece of metal I was out of ideas. But suddenly my brain said to me "Maybe it's the fuse!" My brain must have heard this said by some proper man at some point in the past and I must have been listening too, because I vaguely knew what my brain was getting at. I looked at the plug and the fuse was kind of on the outside for easy access(which meant I didn't even have to take the plug apart like my brain was telling me I had to). For some reason I even had a spare 13A fuse in my toolbox and had to hope it was a new one, rather than one that maybe I'd taken out of another malfunctioning piece of equipment. I swapped the fuses around, turned the dial and hey presto. I had fixed the washing machine myself, for free. Again I had proven I was a real man and avoided having to have a workman look at me with pity and tell me that it was just the fuse that had blown.
So the day wasn't wasted at all. I had mended a machine with my own hands. If the comedy and the poker don't work out I think I might put myself in the yellow pages as a bloke who can spray WD40, bleed radiators, change fuses and help build a patio as long as I am under instruction from someone else.
Best of all the cycle of workmen has surely ended now and I can get on with enjoying my house - though I need someone to sort out my central heating which constantly fills with air and
the ghost lights in my bedroom. But those are for another time. Hopefully I will find one specialist who can do both in the Yellow Pages.
