Finding things

When we left our old home behind, I wrote a ten-page document for the new owners. A room-by-room resumé of how the house worked, what day was bin day, where the gas meter key was: the whole bit. What did we get?
1. This is the alarm code
2. The cat likes tuna (we inherited a cat)
3. Err...that's it.

So for the first day or so things were, shall we say, a little hit and miss. Like it took us two hours to find out how to turn the central heating on (the main power switch was painted the same colour as the wall and hence well camouflaged). I had to read the electricity meter and the search for that would have been even longer had the previous owner not been staying at his friend's house two doors down. It was hidden behind a panel in the downstairs lav.

Over the next couple of days the hot water gradually ran out. It got cooler and cooler until eventually there was no difference between the cold and hot taps. We couldn't understand it: the boiler was on for the "normal" amount of time. I went hunting for the hot water tank. Don't laugh - it wasn't anywhere to be seen. Eventually I found it hiding in the half of the attic space that wasn't floored, behind a panel in the cupboard. It looked like it didn't have any lagging on the top half, so I assumed it was cooling down faster than we could heat it up with the boiler. I switched the boiler on to 24-hour operation. After a day, there was still no hot water. In desperation, I tried the immersion heater. Success!

Later, in conversation with a neighbour, I said we were settling in better now that we'd got some hot water. "Oh," he said, "didn't they tell you it was an immersion heater?" *$"*?#! (I found out some days afterward that it's perfectly normal for the top of the tank not to be lagged, when it's a combination water storage cylinder).