There is one aisle in every major supermarket that I always avoid: the clothes washing products aisle.
The heady mix of artifical fragrances being emitted from so many different products, in so many different forms, make me feel nauseous.
Why anyone purchases products that have lingering smells amazes me. Why do some people want to smell of heavily-scented washing powder or fabric conditoner?
For years I have used the example of the myriad forms of clothes washing products to explain how too many choices can cause mental discomfort.
Until recently there have been two main forms of product, solid and liquid. Solid has existed as loose powder or compressed tablet form, often available in normal or super-concentrated form. Liquid has existed in bottles or as pouches, again often in various different strengths. Each format then has a variety of different flavours. And bio and non-bio formulations. And that is just washing products: the fabric conditioners add another level of complexity and choice.
In the past my skin has reacted badly to lots of products, so I always buy the same non-lingering low-scent or unperfumed ‘Almat’ products from Aldi. As modern washing machines use so little water, I also always do the maximum number of rinses (which is 5 on the latest machine, which still only used 35 litres for a large load on a cotton programme).
I favour the small tablets of compressed powder that go in the powder dispensing drawer, as they are mess free, and there is no temptation to put in more product than is necessary. They are concentrated, dissolve well, and produce good results with no lingering unpleasant odour. While each pack is plastic wrapped (due I suppose to the nature of the product), the box is cardboard, and the concentrated format reduces transport emissions and costs.
Over the last few months the compressed powder tablets have been intermittently unavailable and have now disappeared from the shelves altogether.
I tried Lidl as they used to do ‘Formil’ washing tablets and have a limited choice, so not a whole aisle of unpleasant smells. Same issues.
The choice in both places is now big box powder, bottles of liquid, or dissolving ‘plastic’ wrap blobs of liquid which come in a thick plastic box that has appalling environmental credentials and is very hard to reuse as the labels don’t peel off. Both stores have also changed all the flavours. The ‘tropical’ one was so strong that I nearly threw up while standing contemplating the shelf.
The big box powder is too easy to spill, doesn’t seem to dissolve properly, and remnants are always left in the powder drawer. The blob liquid tablets are no use if I want to do a pre-wash (Mr BW’s outdoor work clothes and often caked in mud and need deep decontamination), and the bottles of liquid can’t be used with a delayed start to a load of washing.
Have the compresed powder tablets been discontinued everywhere? And if so, why?
Month: November 2022
It’s a year today since Storm Arwen began building.
As regular readers may remember, we then had 11 days without electricity, and were extremely cold, exhausted, and disillusioned with the power distribution company’s very poor communication and the general lack of support and awareness by all the authorities of the hardships faced by those living in very rural areas without power for extended periods. No, I do not want to go to a hotel as I have animals to care for, needs that can only be met in my own home, which is partly rebuilt and insecure so requires my presence for protection, and nor do I want to drive 13 miles to get a free cup of tea and a biscuit from a community hub in a sports centre in the middle of a covid pandemic, thank you, or to trek 11 miles in the opposite direction to get a free burger as I am a gluten-free vegetarian who has plenty of food in store. All I actually need is a supply of petrol delivered on a regular basis, not the army from 100 miles away turning up three days in a row with a ‘welfare tick list’ and a sheet detailing where I can claim compensation, but no offer of immediate practical support.
A year on, the local community now has its own Emergency Plan (because Mr BW doggedly persisted in not letting the matter drop and eventually was able to draw it up and ensure it was adopted), and, we are assured, the county and regional authorities are better prepared to offer the right sort of assistance in the event of future similar incidences. I suspect the Customer Service Director of the power grid company probably still has nightmares about his conversations with me on several occasions during the crisis last year.
Comparing this year to last, the weather is milder and much brighter, although there are some very gusty winds, from the north-east, which is unusual.
As part of the new electrical systems being installed in the last phase of our building works, we are attempting to future proof and are installing a ‘changeover switch’ so that we can disconnect from the national grid and run the whole house from an external generator point, meaning that we are not reliant on unsafe nested extension cables plugged into a generator. The small petrol generators we currently have only produce 2kWh, so will not run any power-hungry applicances (washing machine, dishwasher etc) so at some point when we are solvent again we will probably purchase a larger diesel generator. This would also solve our previous fuel sourcing problems as every local farm has a tank with thousands of litres of red diesel (tractor etc fuel), which would save us having to do a daily 26 mile round trip for the 20 litres of petrol that one is legally allowed to purchase/transport (which anyway lasts a small generator less than a day). However, despite having 6 months notice of the need to order a changeover switch, the company doing the electrics failed to have it in time to install on first fix a few weeks ago. We’ll have to hope that we don’t need it before 2nd fix.
Where has that year gone?
I went into town very early this morning and found some Snowman and the Snowdog toilet roll in the new Lidl’s.
I have one roll left from the last time I found some which must be around 6 or 7 years ago now. They had two packs of 4 rolls left, so 8 rolls, which should last 8 years, maybe 16, if it only sits on the toilet roll holder to look cute during the FOTCR™ and we use paper from a different roll. Well, I’ll manage that, Mr BW won’t; he’ll forget and use sheets of Snowman without thinking.
When one’s build is now over double the number of working days it should be, one has to take one’s pleasure where one can.
There is a Raymond Briggs retrospective currently on at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle which we journeyed through beautiful countryside in the fog to see last week, on a builder-free day, which have been all too frequent of late. Amazing place (but dreadful, lightweight, website), sweet exhibition, but I absolutely would not pay £17.50 to get in: we continue to be very glad that we invested the bonuses Mr BW received from work from time to time in lifetime memberships to various organisations, in this case Art Pass, which between them give us free admission to almost everywhere we want to go. Lifteime memberships are no longer the good value they once were, but I wish more parents and grandparents would give their children such gifts when they turn 18 or 21 or get married. While it may not be as sexy as the electronic gadgets most youngsters now request on such occasions, free entry to National Trust or Englsih Heritage places and countryside, will provide a liftetime of pleasure, once said offspring are old enough to understand that real ‘culture’ exists outside of a computer animation or their bedrooms.
When one’s build is now over double the number of working days it should be, one has to take one’s pleasure where one can.
The plasterers have now been MIA for 2 weeks, all but one day, having told Mr BW the Thursday before last, at the end of their second day of a 2 week job, that they would be back on “Monday or Wednesday because the lad has cut the end off his finger and has to have an operation.” Next time someone says that, we will be sure to ask which Monday or Wednesday they are talking about.
The builder is very cross with them, not least because they avoided his calls and messages for 10 days, but he has now managed to dig an older plasterer out of some corner or another, and he turned up for the first time today and is currently plaster skimming the three small square rooms which are already plasterboarded. The specialist plasterers are meant to finally reappear on Tuesday, but are not being told that the simple plastering is being done by someone else, or they won’t turn up, and the high arhced/scooped ceiling and window arch are well beyond the skill-set of most normal plasterers. Current substitute seems to be a lot like Local Plasterer ‘Hart Attack’, for those who remember him from 2020: adequate for straight walls and sings badly.
Since I last reported, Mr BW has shifted somewhere between 20 and 30 tonnes of dug-out soil, clay and hardcore, rather than pay another £1,000 to have it taken away in two grab loads. It’s surprising how that much material can disappear, one barrow at a time, when one lives down a very long track with fields with raised edges all around.
With some prodding, and me sitting in the drive on a chair surreptitiously watching and ‘supervising’, while claiming, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’m just contemplating exactly how I am going to plant up the new beds! I just need to sit and stare for a while, now I can actually see what I have, now the concrete blocks, cut stones and bulk bags of aggregate have finally been moved away,” the builders have finally removed all their myriad clutter from the drive and finished off most of the outstanding external jobs: drain downpipes, aco drains, reseating roof slates dislodged when the emergency remedial supporting steels went in, cutting off excess visible overspill of insulation foam, silicone-sealing edges, re-pointing stonework where necessary, insulating every tiny internal cavity they’d missed before.
After bombarding boss man with lots of different ideas for getting the detritus that has sunk into the tarmac surface cleaned up (many thanks delcatto for the excellent lead there), he has now found a road sweeper with water jets that will be visiting on Monday. The final skip disappeared yesterday morning, before it was light. It had at least double the weight in it that is allowed, and, as we were still in bed, we ignored the knock on the door, which would probably have revealed that they were refusing to collect it, or that everything over the load-line had to be decanted into another skip, which would cost another £500. Anything else generated now has to be sneaked into the household refuse wheelie bin: up here the local tip charge £2.50 for receiving every half bin bag of anything vaguely resembling building waste. It’s no wonder that fly tipping is rife.
129 days of having to look at the builders’ portaloo in the drive have finally ended. Mr BW asked the builder to move it, so that the road sweeper could get right into all the edges on Monday. It’s now at the end of the track outside the main gate, out of sight, where the skip was. It hasn’t been cleaned that many times because the builders kept using it as a repository for bags of lime, cement, and rolls of insulation, and the ‘poo sucker’ (as Mr BW calls it) that visits weekly refuses to empty or clean when it is, and I quote verbatim from the operative, “Being used as a fucking store rather than a lavvy!”
It’s now raining torrentially, so we will have to hope that the big arch doesn’t leak again at its internal side points, like it did last week when the storm hit it from the non-prevailing north east. There are only so many times that the carefully cut arch stones can be removed from 12 feet up, the structure behind replaced, then the stones carefully reset and repointed.
The only good thing about the specialist plasterers’ unexplained fortnight’s absence is that had they been here, the arch wall would have been enclosed behind insulated plasterboard and we wouldn’t have seen the leaks, which would have been hugely difficult to locate by the time they were visible as water seeping through new plaster, or unexplained black mould.
Mr BW has just come in dripping and muddy from digging out the new entrance slope in the rain. Because Idiot Not-An-Architect the Architect failed to notice that the front door of the new entranceway would end up being two feet below the (sloping) ground level, no provision was drawn for the required groundwork and retaining stone walls and surfacing, so it was not costed in to the original quote, and the builder wanted many thousands of pounds to do it as an extra. That couldn’t happen as we have absolutely no money left, as the bottom has fallen out of the southern property market meaning we can’t currently re-sell Coven Sud (after having been let down after 9 weeks by the first buyer, who was also the first viewer), so Mr BW, buoyed by having successfully built a mini-Hadrian’s Wall in the field from the stone that was removed from the demolished original porch and the removed front of the house, is going to do it himself. The builder reluctantly agreed (under pressure of my Terrier Teeth and some home truths about tardiness, honesty, and absenteeism) to cut and remove the top foot of tarmac from the area without further charge, but it still leaves a couple of tonnes of Type 1 and soil for Mr BW to dig out and relocate before we can start levelling, concreting, building retaining stone walls, constructing new flowerbed areas and gravelling.
With a building that should have been finished on 23rd September that will frustratingly not now be finished this year, before either my 60th birthday or the FOTCR™, perhaps you can see why unexpectedly finding Snowman and the Snowdog toilet roll this morning made me happy? One has to take one’s pleasure where one can…
Thanks for the the thoughts and info on the inhibitor question. And yes, 2022 is, without doubt, our worst year ever in the almost 30 years, in a few weeks time, that we have known each other.
I have adopted a new Builder Control Tactic.
Given that they seem to be doing everything in their power to annoy us: turning up late, not turning up at all when they’ve promised they will, going home after a couple of hours without finishing jobs, not clearing up before going home, failing to tell us when a delivery isn’t going to turn up so we wait in all day unnecessarily etc etc.
This new tactic is Major Insincerity: being disgustingly, sickeningly, sweetly, over the top nice and thanking them far too profusely for doing every little thing that they are finally getting round to that has been outstanding for, in some cases, months, whilst at the same time making jolly sure that every little thing that I might have let pass, had they not been so tardy in doing anything lately, is resolved to my complete satisfaction. One has to take one’s satisfactions where one can, and while I would like to tell them exactly what I think of their behaviour, that is not going to get the job finished, or any ensuing problems resolved. Good job I have a strong belief in Karma.
This morning we were chatting to a neighbour (he lives a mile away but is probably our third closest neighbour) who was passing, walking his dog. I suddenly realised that where we went wrong was in saying this was the last phase of our works. What we should have done is say we have several other projects for next year (even though we don’t), then they wouldn’t be treating this as a bit job. You live and learn. They will definitely be waiting a very long time for the final payment. Working Day 91 today, and we’re still at Day 40 of 50, because the plasterers have failed to return as promised and are not responding to the builder’s phone calls. Until the plastering is finished, second fix electrics and plumbing can’t happen and we can’t get rid of them. We’ve just had to delay delivery of the stairs, due in 10 days, until mid-December.
The surface of our driveway is old tarmac, put down in the mid 1970s. It is thick and well laid, over a deep bed of compacted Type 1. The surface was beginning to crumble a bit when we moved in, but after two and a half years of vehicles of every size and description, and various spillages (plus, I believe, from seeing the empty yellow can in the skip, one of the labourers using brick cleaner on it, which further dissolved an area), the surface is worn away in patches, with lots of loose chippings. One day, if/when we ever sell Coven Sud (the bottom having fallen out of the market, with no-one wanting to undertake ‘lifestyle moves’ rather than ‘necessity moves’ until the economic situation is clearer) and if/when we ever manage to get the old sheds cleared out and removed, we will have to have the top planed off and the entirety resurfaced.
When the builders finished the last phase around Easter time, they failed to get the surface adequately clean and mud, dust from cutting block and stone, sawdust, sand, cement, plaster, oil etc etc is now ground into the undulations. They tried lots of ways to clean it, but none was successful enough.
This time, before they go, they need to get it properly clean, as I simply cannot put up with having filth trailed into the house every single time we walk across what is a very large area – around 40 metres by maybe 15 metres.
What it needs is some kind of commercial jet wash that squirts out water but also picks it up as what is dislodged cannot be allowed to run off downhill into the soakaway/roof/surface water drain as it will block it somewhere in the quarter mile between us and the burn at the bottom of the grassy hill.
Knowing the breadth of knowledge of readers, I’m hoping that someone might know if such a machine exists, and if so, where they can be hired? I think that motorway and major infrastructure constructors must use such kit, but, without knowing what it is called, it is hard to find it. Thank you in advance for any ideas..
If several gallons of water containing the ‘inhibitor’ that is put into central heating systems to keep the pipes and boiler ‘clean’ leaks out onto a concrete screed that was laid 4 weeks ago (and is allowed to soak in), will it cause permanent damage to the concrete (either now or in the future)?
It is a 75mm concrete screed that was laid ‘dry’ over 75mm of floor insulation board, which was laid over DPM. Ground floor.
I do not know exactly what brand the inhibitor used is but it wasn’t dirty as it was only put in at the beginning of the year and the boiler was only used for a couple of months before being turned off until works are complete. I cannot find an answer to this question anywhere online.
And yes, you’ve guessed, the plasterers did manage to knock the temporary coverings off the end of the copper pipes (‘tails’) protruding from the wall for the new radiators in two rooms, and yes, they didn’t tell us they had, so we couldn’t mop it up, and so the water they allowed to come out all soaked into the new concrete.
It’s been very windy up here the last couple of days. But so mild – last night was 12.9°C and today 16.4°C. I think that’s about to change, so, in the absence of usable heating, the cold is about to bite, and we’d best gird our loins, or at least look out our thermals (hoping always that they are not in the upstairs rooms that have to remain boarded off and out of bounds for probably another month yet).
The plasterers at least started boarding the new rooms on Wednesday and Thursday. But, as boss plasterer’s mate has chopped the end off his finger, that meant they all had to sit around his hospital bed today and pray or something…
So, in the absence of them and any other builders (just for a change) we had a rare day out and went for a drive round Caviarland’s borders. Tiny roads, hardly any other vehicles around. Beautiful countryside, still with a lot of colour as a lot of the trees are beech. I think that is only the third whole day out we have had since we moved in 32 months ago.
Anyone got any experience/recommendations/horror stories of companies who make roller blinds for arch windows (or specialist conservatory blind companies, which may also be appropriate)?
We’ve had solar-powered roller blinds for the new Veluxes on order for 13 weeks now. They were due next week. Yes, a 14 week lead time. Mr BW has just received an email saying that the world shortage of semi-conductors has put back the delivery time to an unknown date.
Similarly, a friend who has just moved into a newly built eco-house finds that her £40K’s worth of solar panels. solar water heating and air-source heat pump are unusuable until at least the spring because the inverters to power the systems are similarly unavailable due to lack of semi-conductors.
Electric cars are full of semi-conductors. If you want one and you haven’t got one yet, don’t hold your breath, and if you have one and it goes wrong, potentially you could have a very long repair time as the parts you need may not be available.
Most electronics have semi-conductors in them these days, so increases in prices due to supply not meeting demand, together with rampant inflation, will mean that soon the world as we know it will be under threat for other reasons than climate change, wars, and the incompetence of governments.
It was either Benjamin Disraeli or Mark Twain, or maybe someone else entirely, depending on which source you choose to believe, who said, ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’
My statistics on builders’ progress are irrefutable.
I now posit that there are actually 4 sorts of lie: the fourth being Builders’ Lies, which are in an altogether Closer To Hell category.
It is now Working Day 85 since the builders started and they are still stuck at Day 38 out of 50 according to the schedule, because there are so many uncompleted things from previoius days. I just can’t wait until they are gone. I can’t wait until we don’t have to be up and ready by 8am every single day, just in case they bother to show up on time. Not to mention so many days when there have been pathetic excuses for when they’ve not shown up for work.
I’m thinking that we now may pay the final staged payment as many days late as they are when they finish. It seems only fair.
Apparently the plasterers are starting tomorrow. Apparently. First it was 4 or 5 weeks ago, then 2, then Monday, then Tuesday, so forgive me if I am cynical.
The builders are down to boss plus one teenage labourer as the other labourer who has been here recently has been on ‘paternity leave’ for the past week. Second child. He is 17. I thought condoms were freely and readily available these days? I strongly suspect that every time a male child is popped out by an employee, boss builder rejoices as it is another minimum-waged labourer for him for the future. Michael Rutter’s ‘Cycles of Deprivation’ has never been more relevant.
Every time I hear an excuse for lateness or absence, I am so tempted to say, “And did the dog eat your homework when you were at school?”
Actually, I have stopped interacting with any of them. I now let Mr BW do that. I’m utterly sick of them and the sexist overtones of interactions. There will never be north/south ‘levelling up’ while there are Northern builders and tradesmen and their 1970s attitudes.
I am now channelling Margo rather than Barbara. It is called self preservation.
My most used electrical gadget is undoubtedly the paper shredder. It’s a fairly heavy duty ‘small office’ cross-shredder one with a 15 litre bin. Any unwanted paper or thin cardboard product goes through it to provide small pieces of dry carbon-rich ‘brown matter’ for the compost bins.
Due to the colder climate here, the numbers of mice, voles and rats, and the vicious winds, we have given up on having the row of huge made-of-pallets-style 5 foot cubed bins we had down south, and are now using umpteen small daleks. These are wind resistant (with a lump of stone on the top) and wind deflecting, made of recycled plastic, and retain heat and moisture, so make compost quickly. They do, however require thin layers of alternating green and brown material, which needs to be chopped into very small pieces and spread evenly across the top surface, and then, when the bin is full, ‘topped off’ with a layer of grass clippings to provide a nice warm but airy ‘seal’. Before, with our row of huge bins we used to throw everything on in piles, never bothering to spread it, rarely watering it or giving it ‘activator’ (of the human not artificial variety), never bothering to cover it, and just dug it out for use a year later. Now, it takes a bit more planning, hence the need for as much shredded paper as possible. We have never turned compost as that is too much like hard work and honestly not worth all the effort.
Recently the paper shredder has been getting clogged up around its cutting wheels, and struggling to cut even one sheet of A4-weight paper (it is rated to cut 8 at a time). I concluded that it was yet another casualty of unnecessarily and disappointingly premature planned obsolecence, and/or that the blades were completely blunt (cardboard being a taxing material to chip), and started researching for a replacement. It proved totally impossible to discern what was what from online details, so I rang the support line for the one I have to ask for information on current comparable models.
I explained the problem I was having, and asked her advice on a replacement model. The nice lady on the other end of the phone paused and the said, “When did you last oil it?”
“Oil it?” I stammered, “Am I meant to oil it?” Apparently, one is meant to put ‘shredder oil’ (“Any vegetable oil will do, but I’m not meant to tell you that!”) across the blades, once a month, through the shredder slit, whilst running the mechanism backwards (so, in ‘unblock’ mode).
I’ve now dribbled three lots of oil on it (a few hours apart, with light use in between) and it is working almost as well as it did when new. Which is surprising, given it’s had 31 months of multiple-times a day use with no lubrication.
I’m posting this just in case I’m not the only one who didn’t know about the need to oil paper shredders… or perhaps I am?
Thank you for your answers, which made me smile happily.
I seem to have finally shamed the builders into getting a move on.
That is, in desperation at the lack of progress, I played a high stakes game.
While chatting, I told every trade that came up here in the past couple of weeks (we know the plumber, electrician and joiner very well by now, and they all work together on different jobs, although they are separate companies) that, although the builders do a stonkingly good job when they do turn up, they are currently 8 weeks behind on a 10 week build and I am sick and tired of the very thin excuses for lateness or absence and continual late changes of plans, having specialist trades only able to work on Saturdays (clearly ‘cash jobs’, but meaning that we can never have a proper break without workmen around at a weekend), and of no-one ever clearing up before they go home, because they are in such a hurry to leave.
Obviously that got back (my plan worked!) and the builder (usually very mild-mannered and obliging) had a real go at me yesterday morning, claiming they were not 8 weeks behind (some kind of weird logic about 50 minus 38 is 12, and if allowance is made for bank holidays, cement needing to set, and delays while steels were manufactured, they were actually on schedule!).
When I pointed out that 79 minus 38 was 41, that was over 8 working weeks, and no cement set that slowly, he threatened to walk away.
I left the discussion in disgust, but Mr BW (master of reasoned negotiation) managed to calm him down (he is half our age) and get him to see that we do have a valid point and that if he just got here in a timely manner and with the right number of labourers, and got on with things, he could have our money in his pocket and us out of his life very very soon.
Seems to be working so far…
Today three of them worked tirelessly on some of the outstanding internal jobs, and looked exhausted by day’s end; tomorrow they will put the roof insulation boarding into this wooden boxing-round-steel-beams structure, and then they will be doing external finishing off for the rest of the week. The plasterers are meant to be starting next Monday or maybe Tuesday, for up to 2 weeks. And then it is just electric second fix and the radiators to go on, then it is over to us to finish off, paint, tile, fit the staircase (not arriving until the end of the month) and fit out the cloakroom and utility room.
Mr BW’s back is a bit better today, and I am nagging him endlessly not to do anything as he needs to get completely better to be able to do all the work left to do once the builders have left.
However, miracles notwithstanding, I am still likely to have a 60th birthday just before the FOTCR™ with a still-unfinished house. Given that September 23rd was the predicted completion date, there should have been plenty of time for us to get everything finished, even if they had over-run by a couple of weeks, so that is very disappointing.
The 3 new small windows were made incorrectly (small top openers rather than half and half) and I am very cross about that as it spoils the look of the left hand front of the house, but the window company are refusing to do anything about it, saying it will be up to the builder to pay again to remake them. We have decided that it is not a battle worth fighting as if he has to do that he will simply add the cost on somewhere else, plus it will create a lot of bad feeling and potentially lead to him doing a bad job finishing off things. And, if we ever manage to sell the southern houses, and can pay off all our current borrowings, we will hopefully be in a position to change them should we so wish.
It was very windy and rainy this afternoon. Almost gale-force in fact. It seemed somehow appropriate.
Tonight is the first night for about a week that we have managed to have a proper cooked dinner, and we have finally been able to take down the protective plastic anti-dust sheeting and open the doors through to the kitchen so that we can benefit from the warmth of the Aga circulating through to the two rooms in which we are living. It has been 13 degrees in our bedroom the past couple of nights and that is only 4 degrees above recent night-time temperatures.
I was shocked by the news today that last year’s census reveals that one in 6 people now residing in the UK were born outside the country, and, in a separate study, one in every 180 Albanians are currently awaiting processing as refugees in reception centres here. Also, “The average household size in England and Wales in 2021 was 2.4 people, as it had been in 2011, but six in 10 are single-family households and three in 10 only have one person.”
Assimilation of migrants at this level, and degredation of nuclear families at this level, simply cannot work. What is going on? And where will this lead?
Thank you to those who left words of encouragement under the post below.
Things continue to be, erm, stressful, challenging, exhausting, and unbelievable, to say the least. We have now been living in 2 rooms for about 6 weeks, and the kitchen has been out of bounds during working hours, due to noise and the incursion of fine grit from adjacent building works, despite our best efforts with plastic sheets and gaffer tape, every single day for a week now.
I know there are those who love logic, and mathematics, amongst my readers. May I ask a question? This of course pertains to the current situation, as my understanding of maths seems to be different to the builder’s (who last week tried to charge us more VAT on something that was an additional item we’d requested that he’d already quoted as including VAT – that would have been another £800 in his pocket had Mr BW not been rather better at keeping track of things, and maths, than him. He claimed an understandable error, I claimed sharkish practice, you decide).
My question is:
If a building project is meant to take 50 working days (ie 10 working weeks of 5 days), and on working day 79, works are only up to day 38, how many days/weeks are they behind? (And please explain your reasoning/rationale, because if I am wrong, as he claims, I need to understand why.)
By way of reward for your answers, I can offer the following amusing northern gem from the local parish magazine:
“The next Bacon Butty fundraising morning is on Tuesday 8th November in the church. Unfortunately, due to rising costs, we apologise that the price has had to increase slightly to £3, but please remember the price does also include unlimited tea or coffee.”
As I went to press ‘post’ a van pulled into the drive. Gotta love that warning dinger and the ‘see in the dark CCTV’ that we have. I wasn’t aware that anything was due for delivery, and it being nearly a quarter to eight in the evening, I was waiting for it to be the Northern Builders’ Vigilante Squad. Turned out it was a toilet, ordered 10 days ago, on a next day delivery. Upside down in its packaging, dented box, unpacking – and potentially yet another damage claim – must await tomorrow morning as I have absolutely no energy or strength left. E-v-e-r-y s-i-n-g-l-e d-a-y is the same currently….