We’ve been very busy with the house over the last few weeks. It’s hard to imagine that only one calendar month has passed since we moved in, but that’s the reality of the situation.
Dozens of boxes have been unpacked, their contents generally neatly filed away.
Our antique bookcase has been delivered and placed in the living-room. Its shelves are already ablaze with the warm sight of aging books, each one occupying a slot not just on its respective shelf, but also an unique position in the tale of our lives.
Many purchases of small items for the bathroom have been made, amongst which a Vipp pedal bin and some towels, a Samuel Heath toothbrush holder, some soap dishes and a few more odds and ends.
Boiler and air-conditioning maintenance was carried out last week. A few new filters still need to be ordered and fitted, since the previous owner apparently did no maintenance whatsoever. The underfloor heating on the second floor is also out of commission while the LCD control panel is repaired.
The garden has had its first bout of maintenance. A surprising amount of work was required, but, luckily for me, it was carried out by someone else. It’s looking a lot better now.
The house’s alarm system was malfunctioning, but has since been fixed by replacing one of the movement sensors.
Similarly, the outside lighting was tripping one of the earth switches after heavy rainfall. Annoyingly, this was taking out the office and washing room electricity. The suspected culprit lamp has been found and taken out of commission, so hopefully that will be an end to it.
The NEC telephone exchange has caused its fair share of headaches, but seems to be properly configured now. I had purchased some nice Siemens ISDN phones, but the exchange’s internal ISDN S0 bus wasn’t working, so we hadn’t been able to use them until a couple of days ago. Not only was the S0 bus not configured, but a couple of wires had also been incorrectly connected, so it was never going to work until that had been fixed.
I bought a fax machine the other day, because, since getting back to Amsterdam, I’ve found that there are a few occasions per year that I need to send a fax. The fax facility on my mobile phone doesn’t really cut it, and a simple fax machine doesn’t cost much, so it seemed worth shelling out on one. Now that we’re back on ISDN for the first time in ten years, we have four MSNs (telephone numbers, that is), so we can allocate a separate number for the fax.
My old American Klipsch computer speakers bit the dust when I forgot they needed to be plugged into a transformer. I accidentally plugged them straight into the 220V mains here and breathed a sad sigh as I heard the subwoofer make a feeble popping sound as its soul parted from its body.
I went to BCC and replaced them with a set of surprisingly good-sounding Bose Companion 3 speakers. These have dual inputs, so the Sonos in the office is also directly connected to them. That saves having to run the Sonos through the line-in of the computer’s sound card, which avoids any strange ALSA mixer troubleshooting issues.
Next week, a contractor is hopefully coming to the house to perform some urgent maintenance that can’t wait until after the winter. I’ll be a lot happier once that has taken place.
There are numerous other little jobs here and there that need doing, but nothing terribly urgent, so we’re just taking care of things as and when they occur to us. The only thing that can’t wait is the repair of the garden shed’s roof, which is in a pretty poor state.
I think we’ve achieved a great deal in our first month and we’ve now gained a pretty good understanding of the house and its systems.