The first thing out of the back gutter was a tennis ball. It dropped onto the patio with a wet thud, followed by a rope of black leaf mush, and Alfie said, "That's mine," in the voice of a boy who has been waiting two years to be right about something. Rob, at the top of Steve's borrowed ladder, said it was not his job to find out how it got there.
It was Saturday 19 September. Rob had one of his rare Saturdays off, the sky was bright and breezy at about 15 degrees, and after Alfie's football I wrote a list on the back of an envelope. A 1930s semi doesn't ask for much in the autumn, but it asks for a few specific things, and if you skip them it sends you the bill in January.
The ladder jobs
Rob did the back gutters while I held the foot of the ladder and Isla held the bucket, and Alfie supervised from the trampoline. We have a plastic gutter scoop that cost £4.50, and it's better than hands. It took forty minutes for the back of the house and produced three buckets of sludge, a lot of sycamore seeds and the tennis ball. One joint over the back door had been dripping all summer, so Rob put a bead of sealant on it (£6.50 for the tube) and we left it to cure.
The front of the house is higher, over the bay and the porch, and that's the part we pay someone else to do. A man with a van and a long pole did both our front gutters and Jean's, because we're the other half of a pair of semis and share the roofline. It was £40 for the two houses, £20 each, and Jean paid her half in cash with a plate of flapjack on top, which she says is the only way to settle with a man on a ladder.
The airbricks
The little vents at the foot of the walls are the airbricks, and on a house like ours they matter, because the floor under the through-lounge is timber with a gap underneath, and the airbricks are how that gap breathes. I counted seven round the outside: two at the front by the bay, two at the side and three at the back. We went round with an old bamboo cane and a toothbrush and poked out the cobwebs and the leaves.
One at the back was nearly blocked. It was behind the raised bed, where the soil had slumped over the years, and we'd been wondering for a year why the corner of the dining end smelled musty. Rob dug the soil back about three inches and the bricks are clear now. I'm not claiming that fixes the smell, but it can't have helped.
Boiler pressure
The combi lives in the kitchen cupboard, and the gauge on the front reads 1.2 bar when it's happy. Over the summer, when the heating was off, the needle had crept down to 0.8. At work I hear about this one all the time in the first cold weeks, because a low pressure reading means the boiler stops and people ring the office. I topped ours up with the filling loop, the way the engineer showed me last October, a quarter turn at a time until the needle was back at 1.2. I read the instructions in the drawer first. Read yours before touching anything, because boilers differ.
The service is booked for Saturday 10 October with an engineer from the firm, at my staff rate of £60 (the boiler cover we pay £14 a month for doesn't include the service). I bled the upstairs radiators with the £2 key and got a hiss from the landing one and nothing from the others. That's the whole job. The radiators will go on when the weather says so.
The list on the envelope
- Back gutters cleared and joint sealed: £11 for the scoop and the sealant, plus Rob's Saturday
- Front gutters, paid for and split with Jean: £20
- Airbricks cleared, one dug out
- Boiler pressure topped up, radiators bled
- Boiler service booked: £60
Everything we did ourselves cost £11, and the whole list is £91 with the service, which I'd be paying anyway. The envelope is back in the drawer with the takeaway menus, ready for next September, tennis ball not included.
