Just as I was about to leave for work this morning a plumber turned up.  I wasn't expecting one, and it meant I had to faff around going to find my landlady so I could go to work and know that the house would get locked at some point.  grr.

This isn't quite as random as it may sound, as our landlady is getting central heating put in the house after we move out.  At least, I thought it would be after we moved out...  We've seen the listing on the lettings agent's website and it says 'available April', giving her a good two and a half weeks of empty house to get stuff done.  But no.

Some people turned up last week to have a look and give her quotes, which is fair enough.  I wasn't quite sure what this bloke was going to do today, because I hadn't entirely been warned about it (yeah, landlords are supposed to give you 24 hours notice of stuff like this ).

So I was less than amused when I got back from work to find pipes all over the place and huge amounts of plumbing supplies in a big heap on the living room floor.  He'd also moved all of our stuff around, obviously because he needed to get to certain bits of wall to drill holes and stick pipes in.

Why the hell couldn't she have told me they were actually starting the work?!  And more to the point, why couldn't she wait until after we've moved like she originally said?  Fucking hell.  I have no idea how long all this is going to take either... a good few days at least.  The house is full of boxes in varying states of fullness, so it's not like it's easy for the plumber to find space to work either.

I was slightly concerned when we moved that having the landlady living right across the road would be bad - I thought she'd be constantly spying on us and nagging and stuff.  Which hasn't happened, apart from two incidents that she really had no business to be telling us off about (oh no I didn't clean the bath!  When she shouldn't have been in the house looking at it anyway...).  But she's kept out of the way, which has been very good.  Only now as soon as she found out that we were planning on moving out it's been fairly constant.  Phone calls at stupid o'clock in the morning asking what exact date we'll be going, twenty questions each time she sees me about whether Alex is still living here or not (and she always sounds so disappointed when I say he is..).  Quite looking forward to the new place, as the owner lives abroad so can't meddle.

tags: grr house