Water, water everywhere, but I have a new hat and bag.

This week, Oy, it was enough to try the patience of a saint. Thank the lord for wine, chips and shopping is all I can say.

Tuesday night I had just hollered to Himself that dinner was ready and sat down when he said "Come here a minute" (he was upstairs getting changed after work)
Me "Why? I've just sat down"
Himself "You've got to see something"
Me "Nope, I've just started eating it can wait". Himself comes downstairs and says the bathroom floor is soaking wet.......and it was.
Cue me giving up on my dinner and spending the next half hour moping up and placing strategic containers under the culprit (the toilet AGAIN!!) whilst Himself tried to rustle up some kind of response from our rental agency and landlady's cousin up the road. Two hours later it was established that the cousin was at work and none of the agency's 3 emergency plumbers was able to come out!?! but one of them did helpfully explain how to switch the loo off at the valve so at least no more water was going in to end up on my bathroom floor.

Next day the cousin arrived with his plumber who had 'fixed' the toilet last month and decided it was the handle that was leaking???
 Now not only is the handle ABOVE the waterline but the water was coming from under the cistern and not down the front as you would expect if it was pouring out of the handle. They replaced the handle and said the toilet was definitely fixed now.

Thursday morning I got up and got ready for work, no flooded bathroom, great stuff. Went downstairs to make my essential to being able to function in the morning cup of tea and not only is the kitchen ceiling raining, the floor is under an inch of water. I turned the early morning air blue.

Now as a rule I am a very happy, calm and placid person, it takes an awful lot for me to loose my temper but in the words of my friend Murray, the red mist descended.
Food was ruined, some of my things were ruined so I lost the plot big style. Himself assessed the situation in a flash and bustled me out of the door to work. I will deal with this he said.

By lunchtime I had just about calmed down again when Himself texts me 'ring me' he says, so I do.

Now apparently the cousin and the plumber have been round and they cannot figure it out, they think we are wrong and it's not the toilet, it can't be the toilet because they have fixed it, so they turn it back on again. They decide it must be the bath, so they fill it twice with water to see if it is leaking but it isn't. They don't want to take the panel off the side of the bath because that would ruin it and then we would need a new one.

Their conclusion?

a) it has taken 24 hours for water from Tuesday's leak to find it's way through the ceiling
or
b) that that when one of us had our shower that morning we had forgotten to make sure the shower curtain was inside the bath. 

I kid you not!

You know what? it's a damn good job they said all of that to Himself and not me or I might be in a cell right now for plumbercide.
The cousin would call round between 6pm and 9pm when we are both home to discuss it. The red mist descended again and poor Himself was left with a cauliflower ear from my ranting, but oh boy was I ready for that discussion!

I mean SERIOUSLY??  Water taking over 24 hours to get through a ceiling? or a ceiling flooding a kitchen from a incorrectly placed shower curtain whilst the bathroom floor is bone dry? Yeah right.

Himself got home at 4.30pm to be greeted by this

in the second picture you can start to make out a rectangular shape right? That is the pedestal of the toilet!
So the cousin and plumber come back out and agree that as water is pretty much coming through the light fitting at this point that it's serious.
They are still perplexed however by where it is coming from. They check under the bathroom sink, nope, so they try to get the side panel off the bath because it has to be the waste pipe.
 The cousin is kneeling against the toilet pedestal at this point and gets wet.
Bingo!
They finally agree it must be the toilet after all! They switch it off and this time take the cistern off and this is what they found.

Lots of mould from the first leak (nice!) and that the seal at the bottom of the cistern had perished making the metal plate underneath rust right through and yes that's right leak water.
So yeah, we were right, it was the toilet and it was coming from under the cistern where it apparently isn't meant too, yay for us or something.

Anyways the toilet is now 'fixed' again. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Before eating chips and drinking some well deserved wine I got to spend my Friday evening cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom........again!

There was some light to my week. Behold I spotted this awesome vintage bag on Ebay and for the princely sum of £3 plus postage it was mine.

I bloody love it's beaded lucite handled gorgeousness. It's decent size too for an evening bag.

Finally on the day of Mrs T's funeral I was due for an Alexander Technique session but it was cancelled so I went to the Helen and Douglas House Vintage and Retro shop instead and bought myself a rather splendid black hat.
 I did try on a fabulous men's bowler hat that was too small *weep* (god how I wish that one had fitted it was so fab), a top hat that was too big and a pith helmet that just looked mental before settling on this beauty.

It's a little bit bent at the back but who cares? it's not broken so that's fine by me. Bizarrely they also had two vintage milkman's caps but they were pretty mouldy so I declined trying them on.

Next week I am off work and plan to do lots of gardening and a little shopping, huzzah for holidays.