bobble

Nothing is sadder than having to go through things ruined by a flood for the loss adjustors. Our Mr Loss Adjustor visits tomorrow.

Last Thursday night M and I opened out front door after an evening out with some of my work friends to find our trouser hems soaked by a wave of effluent streaming through our front door. There was urine, there was poo, there was an almighty smell. I can safely say I now know what colour toilet paper all my neighbours use.

The cause of this ungodly mess? A blocked drain in the street outside, or rather several. Yes, Southwark bloody Council do for us again. The drains have not been looked at for years y’see. They are partially collapsed due to the subsidence of our car park and the hole resulting from said subsidence - which runs under our flat - is the one that we have to move out for in October (we have a date finally, 20th October).

So, blocked drains. Drains that haven’t been opened in years. Ooh I wonder what is down there? Well in this case no dead animals - thankfully - but two solid foot of compacted shite. The block caused the waste from all our toilets to ‘backflow’ (yes, it’s s technical term) up the soil pipe until it found the lowest point of escape - our flat. Everytime our neighbours flushed it came out in our flat, over the space of 13 hours.

I have totted up over £2000 of ruined winter clothes, coats, lovely suits and cashmere jumpers which were under our bed in storage for the coming winter season. Mostly mine and a good few bought in the US (yes, Anthropology jumpers). I weep. We have had to claim on our contents insurance as the council claim that there insurance only covers the outside. As the problem came from the outside (there shoddy drain maintenance) I am taking umbrage with that.

So we are cursed. We buy a flat with a hole under it, we have asbestos floor tiles, our vendor and freeholder lie to us when we purchased and now we have a shit cascade that ruins clothes, luggage and our bed. As I type this on my temporary bed on the lounge floor I wonder who I have angered up there to have had such an awful year. I thought not being able to afford the next year at college bad enough.

The specialist cleaners also come tomorrow to ’sanitise’ the flat. M did a sterling job through the night on Thursday to try and get the flat habitable but to make our bedroom safe to sleep in we really need the professionals in.

Buying a flat in London is meant to be most first-time buyers dream eh? Ask me about that again in a years time when I have buggered off to Stockholm.

If I see Bob Crowe on my way to work tomorrow I may just be in the mood to slap him

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Subscribe to this comment feed at Bloglines. Both comments and pings are currently closed.