Gutted

This is becoming a recurring theme.

We returned from Disneyland yesterday evening at about 21:30. The thought that our dining-room ceiling might once again have suffered a large amount of water being released onto it in our absence didn’t even cross my mind. After all, we had finally located the cause of that leak: a towel radiator in the bathroom above, right?

Well, I wish brown stains had been the only problem to confront me this time.

It turns out that our leak, wherever it is, isn’t fixed; far from it, in fact.

This time, our dining-room ceiling had burst open under the weight of the water and a very large pool of it was lying on the floor. The ceiling is ruined, as is the parquet floor, which has warped and popped out of place, due to the large amount of water it has absorbed over the last few days. This probably happened on Sunday, within hours of our departure.

‘Pissed off’ doesn’t even begin to describe how I’m feeling at the moment.

‘Trying to keep things in perspective’ is the battle I’ve been waging against myself today. My children are fine, no-one is injured, it’s just bricks and mortar, blah, blah, blah. But just as telling someone whose girlfriend has run off with his best mate that ‘there are plenty more fish in the sea’ does little to console the affected individual, so, too, am I enduringly fucked off, no matter what pseudo-inspirational pearls of wisdom I might utter to myself.

This is going to be a big job to fix now. The ceiling will have to be ripped out and possibly the bathroom floor upstairs will have to be dug up. Presumably, the problem is one of pipes contracting when the house is empty and the thermostat has been turned down. I don’t know how else to explain the fact that the problem only occurs while we’re away.

Bollocks.