The Miracle Cure

I drove to Watford today (someone has to do it) and the roads were eerily quiet. I have rarely seen so few cars on the M25 during the working day. Surely Swine flu hasn't caused that much panic?

The purpose of my visit was to look at the Socket and See range of electrical test equipment from Kew Technik. The number of test meters and detectors now required to comply with the IEE 17th Edition Wiring Regulations has grown dramatically and there are even test meters to test the test meters. The good news is that, in real terms, this equipment gets cheaper and cheaper.

Electronic measuring has hit the building industry in a big way. Last week I was fitting a kitchen and the first thing I did was to set a datum line all the way around the room with a laser. It was a very nifty self-levelling rotating laser from DeWalt. I had another laser to set the right angles and yet another Irwin Straight Line laser to line up the fronts of the units. O.k I could have done most of these jobs with a tape measure and some string. You are either a techie or you ain't. As you might expect with all these electronics the worktops were all perfectly level and square which is more than can be said for the room. Fitting worktops and a four metre worktop is a sure way to find any discrepancies and to some extent it is best to ignore the room and set the whole thing out and then adjust the room to it. These days this is easy to do with dot and dab plasterboard set over the units.

My mate Steve Farrow came round in the evening after a long day's work elsewhere to cut the mason's mitre on the worktop. This is another job that requires precision measuring and cutting. I have worked with him a lot over the years and have seen how to set up the Trend jig and DeWalt router so many times that I am fairly confident that I could do the job myself but a worktop is an expensive item to mess up so I chicken out and get him do it. With the aid of a colour matched adhesive he achieves a virtually invisible joint and my impression is that he enjoys it. He certainly takes pride in his work. He started out as a machine shop engineer and won the national top apprentice of the year award. He brought this discipline with him when he moved into the building industry and whereas to a lot of builders a millimetre here or there is not a concern to him a millimetre is the difference between a good job and a bad one.

When he had done his bit I had to cut in the sink and hob. It is fairly straight forward but I know how easy it is to make silly mistakes such as drawing around the sink and then measuring in and marking the cutting line only to then start cutting on the outer line, and, if I messed up my bit he would have to do his bit all over again.

The Franke Laser sink is unusual in having a mere 10mm lip instead of a rolled over section so my cutting had to be spot on. The sink sits virtually plush with the worktop. I was nervous cutting it in but I knew I just had to concentrate. I have never been that good at using a jigsaw and for a long I couldn't understand why. My trouble was that on a deep cut the bottom of the blade was liable to go its own way so even if the cut was on the line at the top it could be 10mmm out at the bottom. I came to the conclusion that my cutting got worse when I began using bimetal blades rather than the old fashioned kind that snap. The good old brittle blade is a lot stiffer and stays in the roller wheel and remains plumb even through a 40mm worktop. The bimetal blade bends like toffee and goes its own way. The other thing is to use a new blade on every cut out.

Of course all this cutting creates a lot of dust so when I went out for the new pack of jig saw blades I also intended to pick up some dust mask. The merchants were completely out of stock. "Swine flu" said the young lad, "It won't do them any good but you know what people are like. We have also sold loads of latex gloves."

So Steve and I breathed in the dust that evening. The air was thick with the fine particles of saw dust and, unlike natural softwood, this reconstituted wood dust is loaded with chemicals which sting your eyes and give you sore lips. Though it can't have done us any good it is difficult to imagine that something as minute as a spikey little flu bug could move very far in it. If you sneezed, the dust would act like blotting paper. Am I on to something? Never mind your drugs and disinfectants. How much for a bag of finest sawdust guaranteed to cure all known ills?

Power Cut

It is Sunday evening and I have worked another weekend on my daughter's house. It is getting very close to completion and I know from past projects that it is the time when you start to rush things.

This weekend I have been running new pipework for the heating and the kitchen and sorting out some of the electrics. Stephen, my daughter's boyfriend, has been helping me and has proved to be an invaluable assistant. I was keen from the start to make sure he is fully involved so he is not just a labourer.

On Saturday afternoon we were tidying up some of the dog's breakfast of wiring under the floorboards. There were old rubber cables going to nowhere and other newer cable not now needed. The place had been rewired by a firm that specialises in doing rewires in a day. the upstairs and downstairs were both on one circuit and the whole lot went into a junction box in the hall. "Really I would like to strip it all out and start again" I told him.

I pulled on one of the redundant cables to identify it and asked him to grab the other end.

"Is it this one? he asked.

"If that is the one that is moving yes" I replied.

"OK cut that" I said.

"Are you sure?" He asked.

"Yes" .

"The one with the junction box on it?"

"Yes that's it, cut it"

There was a flash and a bang, a great chunk was blown out of the cutters and he sat there looking at me. It looked as if there was smoke coming out of his mouth. His knuckles were burnt black and he didn't say a word. He just looked at me. In my head I was filling in the gaps with my own swear words. I didn't even say sorry. I just looked at him and suddenly he got up and ran down stairs into the garden. He hadn't received an electric shock but he was in shock.

I continued to sit there, re-running the sequence of events in my head.
What had I done? Me the bloke who has been dishing out DIY and building advice for years, me who tells everyone to take care and turn off the power. As I have said elsewhere on this site the second after an accident happens you know exactly what you should have done.

If he had been seriously hurt or died I would have rerun that event in my head for the rest of my life and never been able to look my daughter in the eye again. I had been an idiot, I am still an idiot. He had trusted me and I had let him down, big time. When he asked if I was sure I said yes but I wasn't sure, I couldn't have been sure.
I gave him a hug and apologised. I was very, very glad that he wasn't badly hurt but he shouldn't have been hurt at all.

When I woke up this morning it was the first thought to enter my head. You know something is bad when that happens. I have re-run it countless times and, as with all mistakes you try to square it so it isn't your fault but I can't square it. This was my fault and there is no dodging that.

He is O.K so I can move forward and learn from it. He doesn't have to turn up every weekend for this torture. I need to take better care of him, as much care of him as I do of my own children. I discovered on Saturday morning that I had failed to do that and I also found out that he means a lot more to me than I realised.

Though shalt not covet thy neighbour's meter box.

I was supposed to call the gas company ( or whatever they call themselves this week) to ask if they could move the gas meter out of the kitchen onto the wall outside. It was on my list of things to do but it wasn't my top priority. Then I noticed some guys renewing gas mains down the road so I stopped to ask them if they were likely to be doing the house I was working in.
"Yes mate we are going all the way up this road and round the corner". As part of the renewal they were placing the meters outside. 'A result' as they say in all the best bookmakers, it would save the client (my daughter) a fair few quid.

There were only two guys working on the gang and I figured that it would take them a month to reach me. What I hadn't reckoned on was that these two guys did the work of ten men. They ran around all day digging holes, pulling pipes and tapping the main with the new branches to each property. I hardly saw them stop during the whole day. They told me that they had worked 30 days without a day off and they were due to get to me next week. It wouldn't have worried me if it had been next month because I had gutted the kitchen knocked down a couple of walls and with no cooker or boiler in the house I had limited use for gas.

One thing I did notice was that they were fitting surface mounted meter boxes which in my case would have meant a great white lump obstructing the path. I had a word with them and they said that if I wanted to buy and fit a recessed cupboard they would be happy to fit the pipe to it.

The box cost £24.00 from my local builder's merchant and with the help of a diamond saw I was able to cut it into the cavity wall in minutes. It looked a lot neater than the surface mounted boxes and I wasn't the only one who thought so.
One of the neighbours saw this neat little box and demanded to know why he hadn't got one. Before long he was crying foul and had whipped up further dissent among other neighbours. We explained the situation but the neighbour kept moaning and as much as I tried to keep out of it I was kind of dragged in. "How was I made aware that a recessed box was even an option?" he asked. "I am a builder I just know these things" I told him.
In the end I suspected that what was really bugging him was not that he didn't have one but the fact that I did and had worked some kind of flanker.

The contractors were not able to help him any further but that didn't stop him going on and on. It occurred to me that I could have made myself a few quid by going down the road and getting him a box and fitting it. In fact I could probably make a good living going ahead of the gang fitting recessed boxes. The trouble is that he wasn't about to go private on something he considered to be his birth right. Free education, free health care and now free meter boxes. Surely a winning platform for any political party.

Not able to get his own way on the box he set about stirring things up for the two lads. "What a mess they are making" he said and started to take digital photographs to send to God knows who. They were, by any standards, remarkably neat workers but if you have to dig a hole you have to dig a hole. Anyone who has any knowledge or experience of this kind of work will know that it isn't easy because you never quite know what you will come across when you start digging and driving pipes through with a mole. What they achieve is akin to key hole surgery but it isn't in the nature of most people to view those who dig up the roads as anything other than the evil enemy. Sure they make a noise and slow down traffic, which as we know should never, ever be slowed down even by a lollipop lady on a school crossing. But for that small inconvenience these guys bring gas into our homes and how brilliant is that. The people of the Ukraine who were cut off for weeks in the middle of winter think a reliable gas supply is very brilliant indeed.

How do those lads digging up the roads in all weathers, working 30 days non stop feel about the fact that they never get invited to any awards dinners?

"You get used to people moaning. You can't make 'em happy so why waste time trying". They told me.

They are right, what point is there in trying to make people happy if they feel the world is out to get them besides for all we know they could very well be be right.