No surprises
Anyone foolhardy enough to get me into a conversation about DIY will already know the stories about various bodge-jobs and shortcuts I’ve discovered, perpetrated by a past owner of this house.
Yesterday I replaced the ageing heating thermostat (a rotary-style Honeywell) with a nice shiny digital one – a Horstmann Centaurstat 7, in fact. It has quite a sophisticated built-in programmer (more so than our existing programmer, at least) and will hopefully prevent the over-heating problem we’ve had here since we moved in. I found that the old thermostat was calling for heat at a higher temperature than selected (3-4 degrees higher), causing someone (me) to turn the thermostat up in the morning, causing someone else (Charlie) to complain in the evening when it became too hot.
Anyway, that’s mostly irrelevant – it’s kind of worrying when the purchase of a new thermostat gets you excited!
The cable connected to the old thermostat was surface-mounted in a length of trunking, which looked pretty ugly. It’s now buried in the wall, and if it wasn’t for the slight difference in paint, you probably wouldn’t know (although I probably would tell you).
What made me laugh was that when I removed the old thermostat, I found it had been attached to the wall with… NAILS! In fact, two nails, each a different type. Just in case one was the wrong type, the other would have a chance of being the right type, I guess. I may be alone in this, but I don’t feel an electrical device should be nailed to anything!
I’ve seen it all now. Holes drilled in the bathroom all the way through the wall into the bedroom (and then plugged with garden cane), doorsteps ‘damp-proofed’ with black bin bags (and attached with nails), electrical cables cut and left loose under floorboards, sudden 90-degree bends in buried cabling…
We still have the loft to tackle and a spare room, a dining room, a bathroom, a kitchen, a hallway, and a landing that are as-yet relatively unexplored. I’m sure there will be more ’surprises’ for us to find.
