"teething problems"

Well, mostly my new house has been lovely and I have been enjoying it. However I have to say that like most new products it is has not been without a few teething problems.

Firstly, all excited with our new house, we ran a bath, as I sat in it while the water filled, I was suddenly disturbed by a sort of clunking noise. Matthew tried to reassure me it was water in the pipes, however I had another theory. "Do you think the bath has dropped?" I said. He looked at the seal around the top of the bath and said "yep". Mmmmm.... it had fallen about 5mm, although it did bounce back once all the water was out of it, still it did make me wonder what else I should go sit on or stand in or jump up and down on whilst the house is still under warranty..... The fixing of this is still a work in progress, as the first attempt doesn't seem to have quite done the job.

Next, it seemed rather odd that the key for the front door went around 1.5 times instead of just one or two times. Turns out that the lock has two settings one turn locks it, two does an extra dead lock, but when shut it wouldn't do the second one because the hole the lock went into wasn't quite chiselled out deep enough.... This has since been fixed, but that's another story.

I won't bore you with the other minor mishaps that occurred, but I must tell you about the tank.

I was deep in a beautiful sleep in the middle of the night (2.30am) in the middle of last week, when I was awoken by a distressed shreek from my birds (Oscar and Pepper now live on the patio in their cage unless they're inside playing on the table or their playgym). Often they just settle down on their own and I go back to sleep, but even though they settled down I decided to check on them, so I plodded outside, scaring off the cat that was upsetting them and was just making sure they weren't bloodied when I heard a fountain in the background. Now we're on Level 6 water restrictions, our government has sent us all 4 minute sand hour glass type timers so we can make sure we don't take longer then that in the shower, so fountains are pretty much a giant no-no. So I thought, that's not right, and looked around the corner at what had been a reasonably full 5,000 litre rain water tank, to see a stream of water coming out of the pump which resembled a cherub on a fountain peeing. Not good. So I called Matthew and we tried in our sleepy state to try and work out what had happened, it appeared the top of a bolt had sheered off, and that bolt was hollow and water was pumping out. So we had to turn off the flow of water from the tank to the pump and turn off the pump. This would not ordinarily be a problem, but our tank is internally plumbed and provides the water for that little luxury known as "flushing toilets". I bought my birds a treat to reward them for waking me because if they hadn't we may have lost more then 3,000 L of water that we probably did lose, which is a particular problem because when the water in our pump gets below a certain level, it fills from the mains so that there is always water for the toilets and washing machine.... Luckily the plumber was able to come and get the errant bolt out and fix the problem.

Tune in for my next post: The Fly Plague and My Disgustingly Successful Solution