IT BEGINS

Well, in a tiny parody of the old “slash and burn” techniques known to humanity since time immemorial, the tree’s now been removed from amongst the roof slates in which it was growing, and our roof has been inspected, and the quotation for the second phase of the tiny but costly project to stop water from seeping into my walls has arrived, and, despite being written in fluent “Rooferspeak” - and therefore mostly a complete mystery to me - we’ve kind of agreed to letting them go ahead and spend our meagre savings upon continuing to have some kind of a roof over our heads.

I had, of course, been rather pleased that the quote had been set at what I thought was a “manageable” level, knowing that the savings that had been squirreled away for the coming of the inevitable day when the “something” which “had to be done about it” would finally come, were at least in place, even though large chunks of them were already spoken for simply because of the arrival of the scaffolding.

“We can just about afford this…” I mused, with a certain amount of relief, “…as long as nothing else goes wrong…”

I had, of course, joked about the essential first rule of the television programme “Grand Designs” is that any budget allocated for any building project will have to be at least doubled before the project is completed, but I don’t think that I really believed it.

I do now…

Because, despite the regular doses of lashing rain, and then the scaffolding standing idle since the rather costly “bit of weeding” was done, the work has begun…

We’d arrived home one evening a couple of days earlier, just as darkness fell, but in time to notice that more ladders were in place on the actual roof. This, we suspected, rather implied that progress was being made and the work we’d agreed to in the “second” estimate, and we went inside rather reassured that the worries of the creeping mould and spreading damp patches would soon, at least, be a thing of the past, or, if not that, at least not getting any worse.

I’d also been quite pleased to finally manage to have a quick word with our neighbour as I had arrived home one other evening. The fact that one of the struts supporting the scaffolding tower had been put over the boundary and into my neighbour’s garden had bothered me since I first noticed it, but, because of busy lives and whatnot, we’d not actually run into each other since in order to have a chat about it.

In the meantime, there had been an “administrative error” where our estimate had been posted through next door’s letter box and had been “opened in error” as our neighbour was already expecting an invoice from the very same building company which we are using to have our work done. Naturally, an apologetic note had been scribbled on the back of the envelope explaining all of this, but I did also want to explain that we hadn’t really been bothered by this slight and inadvertent intrusion into our business dealings.

Happily, because our immediate neighbours rather luckily seem to be thoroughly charming people, there were no problems about any of this and, in fact, I was told that they had already mentioned to the builder that if there were any immediate and accessible problems that could be resolved whilst the scaffolding was in position, they’d be more than happy for those to be dealt with too…

Hmmm…

Then, one afternoon, my telephone rang at work, which always bewilders me, not least because virtually nobody but my boss has that number, but also because the signal coverage in the grey box next to the sewage works is notoriously awful and any conversations seem to immediately resemble an old “Norman Collier” routine.

Basically, it was the builder calling.

They had, it transpired, discovered “problems” and the initial estimate would have to be torn up as they would need to do far more work than was originally imagined when the roof was first inspected because the roof is so old that certain standard things which you might expect to be in place in order to make a roof “sound” and “waterproof”, the two things which are pretty much essential when it comes to roofs, were not actually in place.

Whether they’d rotted away over time or were never the kinds of things put in by builders of cheap Victorian workers’ dwellings is anyone’s guess, but this is precisely the sort of possibility – the fear of what might be uncovered once anyone started probing around - which led to my years of procrastination in the first place.

In the end, of course, there’s not really much choice but to let them go ahead and do it. All I can do is cross my fingers and hope that the budget doesn’t run out when they’re still at a stage which leaves me with no roof up there at all. It is, however, all a bit of a worry, so I’ll no doubt be returning to this topic again over the coming weeks...

It begins…