A Study in patience

You're probably wondering (because I know you hang on my every word about the progress we're making with our decorating - lol) what's happening with the study, since the last time I mentioned it was way back in June.

Well, we've had a bit of a set back.

We always wondered why the plaster on the ceiling around Nikki's chimney breast took MUCH longer to dry than the rest of the room. Once I'd put on the first coat of primer, the answer became obvious: the roof is leaking.

Probably, we suspected, just a small hole in some of the flashing around the chimney stack. We've been let down by roofers badly in the past (we still haven't managed to extract any money from our insurers to pay for our last lot of roof work, because the guy wrote a non-existent VAT number on his invoice), so this time we wanted to go by word of mouth. Luckily our friendly plumber (who installed our new boiler, and who we asked to quote for new radiators for the study) knows a reliable roofer.

Not *that* reliable as it turns out, because he didn't return our calls or messages for over two weeks. We assumed he'd gone on holiday but it turned out he'd "just forgotten." Anyway when Andrew called to check if we were ready for him to install the rads, and we moaned about his roofer, he agreed to chase the guy up for us and amazingly he called the next day.

When he came round to size the job up, I took him into the study first so he could see where the problem was from the inside. I pointed up at the chimney breast.

"It doesn't look like a bad leak at the moment," I said, "but it's holding up the decorating."
"It's not so bad over there," he agreed, "but what about here?"

And he pointed up at the ceiling opposite the chimney breast.

This part is hidden by the beam between the two rooms and to be honest we'd never looked up there, although the damp did appear to be new and the rain today and yesterday has been particularly bad. I was quite taken aback, but there was a silver lining - he agreed the work was urgent because damage was being caused, and he's put us at the front of his queue.

Nevertheless he can't get onto the roof until the rain stops, so we still have no idea when we'll be able to get on with the study.