Riverview

I’m quite enjoying building my roof. Although I am really slow. Here’s the latest stages:

Nice neat noggins or what?

The old asbestos cement tiles were ripped off last week, and the roof has been refelted. Inside the old ceiling and minimal insulation was removed a few days ago. The space inside now looks fairly odd. Almost unrecognisable from a week ago.

So the builders have done week one. So far they’ve ripped of the kitchen roof, scaffolded the main building, ripped off these tiles (asbestos yuck!), replaced the bits of rotten wood, redone the edges, refelted and rebattened out the roof.

Note all the ridge tiles which are in good condition, and will be reused,

I’ve finally started ripping the roof of the old brick shed. I was not sure whether to or not, but after starting to do so I am glad that I did. The wood was rotten, and needed to go.

And with the wall plate on, taken from the scaffolding on the main house.

So I get a phone call saying that there is some water coming out of a manhole cover about half way down the garden. Unfortunately we’d been visiting the Grand Designs Live show (how sad), and was at least 90 mins away. By the time we got to the house it was now dark. Although there was a bit of sewage coming out of the manhole, it appeared to be mostly water. Wrongly I decided that this was just rain water, and there was no big issue.

So the next day I get up early knowing that I have some shit to shovel. A not particularly appetising thought, especially since I’d just spent an hour two days previous doing exactly the same in the house we are now living before the cottage is finished. However, the previous night’s ’small stream’ has now turned into a torrent, and the garden path is now a stream of shit that was getting closer and closer to the river.

At that point I was getting increasingly concerned and curious as to why two houses (one empty, the other has one occupant of 94 yrs) are producing enough sewage to produce a 20 cm high fountain out of the manhole cover.

So I open it up with the crowbar. Eeek. Now there are numerous ‘fresh’ turds and a lot of tampons (bin, please ladies!) floating in the garden. I was still very confused as to where this is coming from, but I had no time to think. I got my drain rods and tried to flush it out. I started with the rods only first, to see if I could find the blockage. Nothing freed at all, even with eight rods down there. So I get the plunger disc and started again. After four big ‘wushes’ the manhole started to drain, except only to about half empty. Still nowhere near what should be an almost empty manhole. Not knowing what to do I went for a cup of tea (shit shovelling is thirsty work!). After making the cup of tea last far longer than normal, I went back to the shit, and I tried to free it up further with the rods. This time it worked, and all of a sudden the water drained completely away. Except I still could hear a splashing noise. There was water spouting out of the manhole cover in the lane now. I appeared to have moved the blockage far enough away that it had gone past the main sewer in the lane, and caused sewage to start pouring out of that at a fair pressure. It was now way past time to call the professionals. An advantage of living next to the river is that such a sewage leak is regarded as a pollution risk, and so they were out very quickly. They did a fine job too, including cleaning our garden up as much as was possible.

After some thought and discussion with the Anglia Water guys this is what had happened. The main sewer was blocked just after the point where our sewer joins it. Apparently the pump that removes the sewage at the end of the village sometimes chokes (wouldn’t you?) and leaves a lot of blockages in the pipes. However, with many houses merrily flushing away the sewage has nowhere to go and so flowed back up our sewer and out into my garden, which is lower and I guess the point of least resistance.

With hindsight I should have called Anglia Water the evening before. The sewage was definitely not ours, and we could have avoided the garden being covered.

Now what I need to do is persuade Anglia Water to install some non-return valve to prevent this happening again.