HEY HO!

I've been busy around the house today (with my clothes on - take note Richard) doing a bit of a check on things in advance of the building inspector coming on Monday morning.

Murphy's Law of course dictates that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

The first thing I noticed was that the HRV control panel had a flashing warning that one of the filters in the two units in the attic area needed changing. I swear that I hadn't seen this before and it has just happened. I contacted HRV maintenance people and have scheduled for then to visit.

After doing some tidying up around the outside of the house - stacking away bricks, cleaning guttering, wiping window ledges and cleaning a couple of windows I decided to look at the basin tap in the spare bathroom. The Old Girl who uses this bathroom primarily and not the main one which I use as she says "you treat it as if you were living in a student flat Matey!" alerted me to the leak before she went back to Wellington a few days ago.

Student flat bathroom. I think that she was over-exaggerating.

The leak was very minor but as I didn't want any issues with the building inspection I got out the tool kit and decided to fix it. Just in case though I looked up Youtube and found an instruction video of how to fix a leaking bathroom tap mixer. Armed with this knowledge I pulled the tap system apart which was really quite finicky. After removing the mixing tap and the casing to expose and to remove the mixing cartridge I discovered that I didn't have the right tool to unscrew the large flange and thus couldn't remove the cartridge which I'd planned to take with me to Placemakers and hopefully get a suitable replacement. The tools I had (grips) weren't making much impression on the flange and I was worried about stripping the thread or worse. Meanwhile, on removing the tap and the cover a tiny screw, locking nut and tiny plastic hinge went flying. Luckily they did not go down the plughole which I'd forgotten to plug. "Thank Robert's god for that I thought" and then, looking around at the strewn tools and the bits and pieces of tap lying around I thought how even luckier it was that The Old Girl had gone back to Wellington.

I then made the sensible decision to reassemble the tap mechanism and leave it. If the building inspector is to comment on it I'll say that I have a plumber booked in to replace it. This was easier said than done as the little pieces that fell out - I didn't know the exact positioning to put them back in. The online video was very unhelpful on this score. After much trial and error, mostly error, I managed to get everything sorted and reassembled. I cleaned everything up and then went down the drive to turn the water back on. Whenever I do this I half expect to see fountains of water inside the house but fortunately the tap was holding. I experimented with it on hot and cold and noticed, after turning it off again that the slight leakage had become even slighter. I decided to leave it and made a mental note to not touch the damned thing or even go near it until after the inspection is done.

Sheesh!

I'm now not going to fiddle about with anything else before Monday and, if after that Murphy comes visiting again I'll take The Old Girl's advice and "get a man in".