Perhaps this is a good time to go into more detail about why we have had to move house.

About 7 or 8 years ago a whole estate (two roads with several ‘closes’ off of them) were thrown together by cowboy builders on a Friday. The area itself is very hilly, so many of the houses are split level as the back garden is 5 or 6 feet lower than the front.

The poor quality of the construction only became apparent after a couple of years, by which time the building company had been bought by another. All the houses are owned by a housing association and are rented out. The housing association spent a long time deciding what should be done and whether the company who bought the builders was liable to do the work, or whether a claim could be made under the NHBC guarantee etc. etc.

This was dragging out for a long time. At one point between 10 and 12 of the houses were left empty and boarded up because tenants had been moved out, the houses repaired, and they were being kept to move other tenants into temporarily while their own houses were repaired. But the plans for what work would be done kept changing and getting delayed.

Our local MP started writing letters to the owners, and I got the local council involved to try and help some of the worst-affected tenants. (At the time I was a councillor, but tried to avoid any involvement that might seem to be to my own advantage.) My wife got heavily involved. She wrote to every person on the estate and got their agreement that she could act on their behalf in writing a complaint to the Housing Ombudsman. That helped to get things moving, partly because of the threat, but also because it gave the housing association a single point of contact for many things.

Sometime last year we all had our porches’ foundations strengthened (they were starting to come away from the houses), and last month half of our windows were replaced (the sealed units had ‘popped’). This year the more serious work of replacing floors has been done.

Originally we thought all the floors would need replacing, but its only the ground floor which needs doing apparently. And they really do need doing! I can’t play vinyl records in the living room because the slightest movement will cause them to jump.

The total replacement of the kitchen floor means that we will have to have new cabinets, work surfaces and lino, so thats one advantage of all this. We will finally be able to get rid of the nasty living room carpet and get something decent (there was no point in doing it before with all this work impending.)

All I know is that we have been putting off any sort of decorating or improvement for years now, so once we move back in there is a lot of work that needs doing. In the meantime we are all crowded into a smaller house and having to do without many of the comforts of home.