mattnewton.co.uk

I may have mentioned this before, but when we moved in here, there was a plug in my room (my office) that was, how shall we say… put in very poorly. (It was a metal-faced double plug without a backing plate (and therefore, I assume without an earth. Drilled down and eventually popping outside underneath the porch and then drilled into the hallway was the crappy piece of 13A flex that it was on). Not safe in my books. As a temporary measure, I took the metal socket off and put in a metal backing box and a proper plastic double socket. I’m no electrician, but it worked.

Anyway, once we had the electrician put all things right and do some other electrical-type jobs that needed doing, we removed the dodgy wire leading from downstairs to my office (via outside and a bit of jiggery pokery as it would appear) and made the socket inactive. Now I have the job of filling it up before I decorate next week. Easy job…or so I thought.

Well, as you can see, I’ve tried to fill the hole with Polyfilla. At first I put a nice thin layer in so that it would stick to the breezeblock at the back. Once this dried, I put on a second later, this time disregarding the instructions not to lob in too much at a time.

Over 24 hours later, and what should set in 2 hours has still not set. So I’ve pulled out all of the stuff that hasn’t set and I’m leaving it to dry for another night.

After speaking with Bob, what I need to do is cut up some old pieces of wood and knock them into the hole to avoid putting too much filler in there. Once that’s done, I can fill over the surface of the wood and sand down where necessary.

Now there’s another job for me while I’m off next week - sanding. I’ve bought a Black & Decker sander for all the bits that need doing. I don’t know what the previous owners did to my wall to make it need loads of touch-ups, but it’s certainly going to keep me busy for a while before I can paint the room.

More on the big hole in the wall later. Once it’s filled I’ll take another picture and then see if we can see it once it’s sanded and emulsioned over. I do hope not.

That’s a good question, to which the answer I would normally give would be in the region of 2 to 4 - one at each end and maybe one or two in the middle if it’s a long window. OK, your curtain pole may require two screws - one above each other - for each bracket. Anyway, if I said 13 you’d probably think I was having a laugh. Well, laugh away. You see, the curtain pole that was holding our patio door curtains up was held in with 13 (yes, thirteen) screws sitting in 13 rather large holes, held in with 13 super-sized Rawlplugs as can be seen in this picture:

Now I guess you’re thinking that it must have been some really heavy curtain rail or curtains to warrant that many screws? Well, no. In fact, the rail was a less-than-average flat aluminium rail - nothing to write home about (unless it’s something derogatory) and the curtains were just patio curtains (albeit not our choice, but they put us on for a while).

You see, the people who lived here before us (we only moved in here in April this year) seemed to love doing things themselves. Unfortunately, whenever they did, although usually a neat job on first appearance, behind the scenes it was a dog’s dinner. One further example of that is the extra plug sockets that were put in. The one in the room that I use as my office was a metal plated double socket. Apart from the fact that I don’t really like metal plated sockets (reminds me of school), I decided to remove it and replace it with a normal one. To cut a long story short, the box was not earthed and weas being fed from another dodgy socket downstairs with 13A flex insted of 30A mains cable.
Needless to say, we’ve got an electrician coming in soon and he’s going tp put right all of the previous owner’s botches. Meanwhile, in my spare time, you’ll find me around the house pulling out oversized screws and their accompanying Rawlplugs that appear to have no function whatsoever out of the walls and filling up the craters with Pollyfilla.

Now don’t get me started about the lack of painting this house has had in its 14 year existance. That’s for another entry in a few weeks time.