And so, the end is here. It is just over 6 months since I posted my first entry, and we have been through so much together. We’ve had:

• snags galore (here and here)
• gadgets galore (here and here)
• near disaster (here and here)
• killer flies (here)
• and sexy lingerie (here).

I hope that my posts have informed and entertained you. They have certainly provided me with a welcome outlet for many of the frustrations involved with buying a new home.

It only remains for me to thank my wife for her unending support and New Build Inspections for sponsoring this blog. Oh yes, and to provide one final, shameless plug for my hilarious novel ‘A Foreign Education’. Please visit my web site at www.CraigAlanWilliamson.com to download a free preview, or head straight to Amazon UK or Amazon USA to buy a copy of the paperback!

It has been a quiet week in terms of house activity, which gives me time to reflect on events of the previous few weeks. More specifically, it gives me time to consider the great stop cock flood of 2007 and pass on the lessons learned.

The best advice I can give to absolutely everyone living in a property with water, gas, and electricity supplies is this: make sure that you know where and how to switch off each of these services. Your water supply should have an indoor stop cock (usually beneath the sink) and an outdoor isolation point (somewhere in the street, perhaps with your water meter). Gas supplies will have a master isolation point (often in with the gas meter, external to the house) that can shut off the supply with the turn of a handle. Modern homes have an electricity circuit breaker panel (ours is in a downstairs cupboard) with a large main switch that can turn off the electricity supply to your entire house.

My second piece of advice is: have contact numbers for emergency plumbers, electricians, etc. programmed into your phones. When the water is literally gushing into your house from a broken stop cock, the last thing you want to be doing is hunting around for a phone number. Believe me; I know what I am talking about here.

My final advice is: don’t tell teenagers any of this. If they knew that they could switch off the water and gas supply to any house by a few readily accessible outdoor valves, then we would be in a world of trouble.

When there is a leaking water pipe in your house, you should turn off the water supply at the stop cock. When the stop cock then snaps off in your hand, you should swear violently and prepare to get very, very wet . . .

Yesterday was a bizarre, twisted day. Those 6 remaining snags were all resolved and my wife and I then went out on an evening stroll, full of self-congratulatory talk about how great it was that our home was finally ‘complete’. On our return my wife turned on the kitchen tap and then instantly heard a hissing sound from under the sink. She opened the cabinet beneath to see a fine spray of water coming from the maze of piping. I went straight to the stop cock at the heart of the piping and turned it off. A minor disaster was averted. Craig was the hero. A small amount of mopping up and the cupboard was as good as new.

So we are then left without any water, and I’m left wondering where the leak came from. There are pipes out to the washing machine and dishwasher under there, and I was confident I could solve any problem with these links. So I decided to very slowly switch the stop cock back on and observe where this slight, fine, barely visible spray of water was coming from. My hand reached out towards the brass tap, and rotated it with tender care the merest fraction of a degree when suddenly……holy &*(&! The tap literally flew out of my hand, and gallon upon gallon of water gushed forth into my face and my body, and down onto the kitchen floor.

Now I would like to say that I handled the situation with consummate cool and came up with some witty, James Bond-esque comment, (‘Fancy a swim, darling?’), but I’m afraid to say that panic well and truly set in. After catching my breath I shouted to my wife, ‘GO AND GET EVERY TOWEL IN THE ENTIRE HOUSE!’ Ever sensing the urgency of the situation, she proceeded to carefully browse through her 5-or-so towel storage areas, selecting only the oldest and shabbiest of towels. Eventually they reach the kitchen floor and I look around to see a feeble ring of 100% cotton shielding our through-diner and lounge from complete waterlog. After briefly thinking to myself that I was sure we had more towels than that, I continued my futile efforts to staunch the flow of water by jamming the tap back in the gaping whole. I had some success, with the flow being completely stopped for the odd second before it flew back in my face, stronger than ever.

The ceramic tiles in our kitchen are ever deeper under water, and I am moaning and groaning from the strain of shoving the blasted tap against the considerable water pressure. It then strikes me that we need a follow-on plan, especially as our towels are already fully saturated. ‘EMERGENCY PLUMBER!’ I manage through the torrent of water, telling my wife to get the phone number from the window of the sales office. I also ask her to get the next door neighbour. I wasn’t quite sure what he could add to the mix, but I felt it only fair to share the misery around.

My hands are shaking from the cold and the physical exertion, as water bounces against my body and my slippers begin to look like a sinking pair of tartan life rafts. Then my wife returns with the news I have been waiting for: she’s not too bothered about the bathroom hand towel if I’d like that as well. Great, that should make all the difference. But she also managed to get through to the emergency plumber who was on his way, as was my next door neighbour.

The neighbour soon arrived like a beautiful knight in shining armour, taking one brief look at the devastation and then vanishing again. I suddenly felt lonely, cold, and ever frightened for the welfare of our lounge furniture and my beloved 42 inch plasma TV. I used every last ounce of my strength to fight the flow and keep it down as much as possible with the broken tap. And then I heard angels singing on my shoulder and harps playing gently in the distance, and the water flow stopped. It actually stopped! It stopped, it stopped, it stopped! The jubilation was overwhelming, until I looked down to see my feet covered by an inch of water, and the dining room carpet absorbing ever increasing amounts as the flow made its slow progress inwards, threatening to damage our entire furniture collection.

Our neighbour returned to the briefest of hero’s welcomes, having located the outdoor stop cock in the pitch black, and we then rushed to soak up the water from the kitchen floor before it continued its onslaught on our living area. We paused briefly to move the furniture further and further into the corners of the room, while frantically wringing out towels in the sink and then going back to soak up more water. The emergency plumber arrived and instantly joined in the clean-up operation until the kitchen floor was dry and the lounge area carpet was only partially soaked. All of our furniture had been spared, along with my beloved TV and my wife’s best towels. It had been a frantic half hour, but the mayhem was finally over.

- – - – - -

On closer inspection, the plumber could see that the screw thread of the stop cock had literally snapped in two. Apparently it is a very rare event, and there must have been some sort of crack or defect there since it was installed. It was only a matter of time before it would let rip with such devastating consequences. We were actually pretty lucky that it happened then, while we were downstairs. If it had happened during the night then we would have been oblivious until morning, by which time our furniture would have been floating around the lounge.

The plumber returned this morning to fit a replacement stop cock (which only took around 5 minutes), and the site manager arranged for a dehumidifier to be delivered to try and dry out the carpet. He will return on Monday to assess the damage and see whether the carpet needs to be cleaned or replaced.

Joyous occasions in my life: the day I left school; the day I graduated from University; the day I married my wife; and the day I finally had my broadband connection re-activated. Today is a very special day indeed. News, sport, online shopping, high definition pornography – it’s all now available at the click of a mouse.

Aside from that little victory, I am a little disappointed that over 200 snags are still remaining from the list we submitted over 2 weeks ago. The kitchen fitters have resolved a few small issues (wonky cupboard doors etc.) and are planning to come back to replace a scratched work surface and a few other larger problems, but otherwise there has been very little activity. The organisation of the remedial works is also disappointing – some tradesmen leave a note through the door, some call on the phone, some knock on the door, and some contact you via the sales office. It’s all very confusing and not very well co-ordinated.

Back to the good things now, and this week our shared driveway will be block paved as Bloor have finished working on the other houses at the rear of our property. We have also treated ourselves to a motorised garage door that is due to be installed at the end of this week. With the 30 seconds of garage-opening time saved each day I will be able to spend more time on the internet looking at…er…online shops.

So far we have been incredibly impressed with the contractors on site here. Almost every single one of them will smile at you in the street and say ‘hello’, and most ask how our house is and if we have any problems. The electrician has gone out of his way to resolve some problems with our telephone wiring, and one of the dumper truck drivers even stopped to change the tyre on our car when my wife arrived home with a puncture the other day (I was cowering indoors to avoid having to do the job myself). I don’t know whether the credit should go to Bloor for having such a friendly work environment or to the individual contractors involved, but we have certainly been very pleased with the service.

We’ve had friends staying with us for most of this week, so the house has pretty much remained in the same state with one room full of junk but all of the others quite tidy and organised. The plumber has been out to sort a few snags (including a very wonky radiator), and the kitchen company are due on Monday. We decided against having the extra TV cables retro-fitted to our lounge, but managed to negotiate a few small extras from the electrician instead. We now have a double outdoor power socket in the garden and we had all of the hallway low energy light fittings replaced with standard ones. We are still using energy saving light bulbs but at least we can now use standard lamp shades – the low energy fittings have a broader neck that is completely incompatible with most shades.

We still have no broadband internet, but I have figured out how to connect my mobile phone to my laptop for limited, albeit extremely slow, web browsing. In other technology news, our Sky installation took place on Thursday and we had a great pair of guys who did a superb job of hooking a new dish up to existing cables in the roof. I’d heard horror stories of some sky engineers refusing to go into lofts or refusing the use existing wiring, so it really was great to have such a positive and willing pair of guys.

It’s back to work on Monday after 2 weeks off, but at least I have breakfast with The Greatest Toaster in the Entire Universe to look forward to. Not even Jennifer Lopez could bring a smile to my face in the morning with such regularity.