Repairing the Roof

Anyone who has followed or popped into this blog over the course of the past decade and a half will probably have come across mention of our roof leaking. It's not uncommon in Cyprus to have areas where heavy rain leads to dripping through the roof, and we're thankful that it's only ever been above the stairs. Since stairs don't generally have carpets here, it's annoying but it doesn't take long to mop it up afterwards.

And if you haven't come across any of those posts, and/or are interested in seeing some, this post from 2009 was all about rain, with a photo at the end of our cool box and a yellow bucket strategically placed to catch the drips. In our first few years here, we had two or three people come to look at the roof.  One or two broken tiles got fixed, and suggestions were made, but in the end the regular response was along the lines of, 'This is Cyprus. Roofs leak.' 

The problem was that it got worse each year, or so it seemed. Then in 2010, a couple of Richard's sailing friends took a look at the roof, and discovered a hole, and also a large amount of pigeon mess which was making the rain bounce in an odd direction. I wrote in this post about how they cleaned the mess away, and sealed the hole. And it definitely helped the problem that winter.  

But a year later, there was more torrential rain, and once again our roof leaked. I wrote this post, illustrated again with a photo, except that by then we had moved from a yellow bucket to a blue one. In 2014, we had some loft insulation installed, and another hole in the roof was fixed. And so it went on... each year, we expected rain through the roof when the wind was high and the rain was heavy.

So it wasn't any surprise that it happened this year, when it rained - except that it seemed considerably worse than last year's. Out came the cool box again, although this time it was accompanied by a large empty paint pot. 

But I had to remove photos from the walls, something I hadn't had to do for some years. And it seemed that the rain was coming through in more places than previously. We realised it had been a while since the roof was last cleaned, and we knew there was a lot of bird mess up there. So we called our friendly roofing guy, who eventually came at the end of last week, with another guy, to check the roof and fix whatever problems they could find.

It was important that they came on Friday, as heavy rain was predicted for last weekend, and our roofing friend told us he'd been asked, urgently, to look at two other roofs as well that morning. 

It turned out that there were more problems than just an excess of bird mess. Richard had asked if something could be done to make the problem less severe in future, possibly by moving some of the pipes on the roof. Since I didn't go up there (and have no wish to do so) I didn't entirely understand, but it all sounded like a good idea. 

However, when they moved the pipes, they discovered an entire area of the roof that had never been sealed, with some wood that was rotting away. 

And when they'd replaced the wood and sealed the area, they went over the whole roof carefully. They discovered a couple of broken tiles which they removed and replaced. Here are the broken ones:

I think the roofing guys expected to be here for about an hour, but in the end it was nearly three hours. Thankfully it hadn't started raining, so after cleaning up they hurried off to the next job, hoping to fix another roof before the predicted rain.

Except that it didn't rain. There was a bit of lightning and thunder in the distance, but not a drop of rain. On Saturday evening we had maybe five minutes of light rain, but not the kind that would have leaked through. On Sunday it stayed fine and sunny. 

I don't think I have ever before heard Richard express a wish that we could have some really heavy rain - not because he likes rain, but because we would really like to know if this latest repairwork has actually fixed the problem, at least for this winter. 

There's rain predicted for later this week, and Saturday, so maybe we'll find out then:

Or maybe it will be another fine weekend.  Perhaps fixing the roof is the equivalent of going out with an umbrella, and ensures that it won't rain after all. 

A fortnight in January in Cyprus

I decided I would write a blog post each Saturday this year. I managed it once.  I'm not sure what happened last Saturday, but evidently I didn't write anything. I haven't taken many photos this month, either. Rather a contrast to last Summer, when the family were staying and I took several photos on almost every day.  One of the things I've been doing is creating our 2017 photobook on the Photobox site, a few pages at a time. I've reached the end of June, which has almost as many pages as the first five months put together.

Nearly two weeks ago, we had our friend Jacob and his employee Mike back for a few days to do some more repair work on the house. They painted balcony railings, and the spiral staircase we have outside our house, and they 'spritzed' some of the back wall. They made a cover for one of our water tanks, which was - for some strange reason - missing its cover, and they worked with Richard to encase all our external wires in trunking. One of the cables had almost perished in the sun; it should have been encased a long time ago.

We've continued playing board games regularly with our friends, and on Tuesday this week revived an old habit - we played Settlers-by-Facetime with our son Tim, who now lives in the UK.  It took a while to get everything set up and working as we hadn't done this for some years; I think the setup took as long as the game. But it worked well, and was great to have a three-player game, and chat, even if he's two thousand miles away.

On Thursday, we woke to grey skies. Sheila and I went for our walk, although the trail was somewhat muddy and there were a few spots of rain. Within about half an hour of getting home, it started to pour.  Thankfully I had brought in the laundry I did the previous day. In Cyprus, when it does rain, it can be torrential.  There were high winds and hours of rain; the sun came out briefly a couple of times, but mostly the sky was grey. We had a few drips of water through the roof, but mostly it was fine. We had to use our electric water heater to get hot water for showers, as there was no solar heating at all. And it was cold. It had been a mild winter so far, but the house felt very chilly.

Yesterday Richard did the annual UK tax returns. It's not a task he relishes, though I do the bookkeeping through the year so it isn't too hard to get the figures we need to enter. He was quite frustrated by the whole process, as the UK government website seemed to be extremely slow. However, he finished eventually, and in celebration I made his fifteenth cake (out of sixty) for his 60th birthday year. It was a simple microwave chocolate mug cake with Bournville chocolate squares pushed into it; a little dry, but the melted chocolate helped:

It filled the large mug we bought for this purpose, and made two good sized portions:

In the afternoon, the entire Internet seemed to slow down. I don't usually notice when it's a bit slower than usual, but I was trying to print the statements from our two bank accounts and credit card, and I couldn't get some of them to load at all. No problem with the Cyprus bank, but the UK one, which is usually very quick, was unbelievably slow.  

Richard, meanwhile, was trying to download some videos for work, which he had to edit. He was already somewhat frustrated as the work computer had broken down twice in the past couple of weeks. The first time he took it to Nicosia and they cleaned something; the second time, they took it to the Apple dealer, who said it had a hardware fault and they would replace it free of charge... which is fine, but meant Richard was without his main editing computer for several days. So he hooked up his laptop to the system, which wasn't entirely satisfactory... and then the Internet appeared to grind to a halt.

He phoned our Internet provider, and they said that two major cables that connect Cyprus with the rest of the world had been cut.  This news article confirms it. The authorities don't seem to know why... but by this morning, thankfully, it seemed to be much better.  

Ten years in this house - and yet more minor improvements

I'm not very good with dates.

I know all the family's birthdays, but if it weren't for my Google calendar reminding me in advance, I might well forget about them until too late to send a card or gift. I often don't even notice dates that other people celebrate - Valentine's Day, for instance, or Mothering Sunday. Facebook is quite good at letting me know when we, and other nationalities mark an occasion, so I spotted that yesterday was Independence Day in the United States.

But I had entirely forgotten that today, July 5th, is quite an important anniversary for us. Happily, Facebook told me that I'd mentioned it a couple of times in previous years... and so, this blog post is to celebrate that it's ten years today since we bought our house in Cyprus.

I would have been a bit sad if I'd missed it this year, though I'm sure I don't always notice it. That's partly because of it being a round ten years, and partly because in the first six months of this year we've done a great deal to the house, in recognition of our having owned it for ten years. It was looking tired; we had done very little before this year, and some of the paintwork was looking terrible.

I've written at length about the damp proofing system which we had installed back in March.  We won't know how effective it is until next winter, but the guest flat already smells less musty.

Before that, we had employed our teenage friend Jacob to do some painting; many of our window frames had lost all the paint, and some were quite rotten. So he sanded and painted, and repaired, and then painted the places where the damp proof course was installed, and the front of the house downstairs, which spruced it up nicely.

Then in April we had our bathroom replaced, something we had talked about for many years, but finally did this year. We did the last few bits and pieces for that in May, and are still extremely pleased with it.

But one thing that Jacob kept putting off was painting the railings on our front patio. We weren't surprised; it's something we kept putting off too. It looked like a very fiddly and time consuming job. However, our good friend Sheila (Jacob's mother) said that she would like to do it for us, so she came over early in the morning several times, and did a great job. I didn't take many 'before' or 'after' photos, but did manage to get this one, right after she had painted one half of the gate:

The difference is stunning.

When it was finished, we realised how very tatty the postbox looked. Like in the United States, people in Cyprus don't have slots in their doors for mail, but have little boxes outside. We have a PO Box at the Post Office where we get most of our mail, but there are vast amounts of junk mail advertisements for shops and eateries which arrive regularly, and it's a legal requirement to have a post box near the street.

This is what the box looked like:

The lock was a bit rusty, and it looked terrible on our newly painted fence. We thought about painting it to match, but it would have been quite a task, and almost impossible to hold the flap and the opening door out of the way while the paint dried. It was held on the fence by ancient pieces of wire.

So when we had to make a trip to the local SuperHome Centre, for a couple of things, I had a look at the mail boxes. There were dozens of them in all kinds of shapes, sizes and colours. I nearly gave up when I spotted a small black one, at a good price, which would meet our needs perfectly. We bought a metallic number to affix, and Richard installed it... with cable ties:

On the same trip to the DIY store, we saw some mosquito netting that could be fitted to the window sections that open at the top of some of our doors. We thought it would be ideal for the one in the dining room, which we like to keep open in Spring and Autumn, but have had to close in the evenings to keep out mosquitoes.

So we bought it, and Richard installed it immediately:

It took a little getting used to, and now the weather is so hot that we mostly keep it closed if we want to be in the room in the evening, so we can use the air conditioning. But it should be very useful in the Autumn.

There are still a few small things that need to be done: the last bit of plastering and painting on the wall outside our bathroom, a new fitting in one of the loos, re-tiling in the guest flat bathroom. Our friendly local builder said he should be able to come some time this week. It will be good to have these last few bits done. There are still other more major jobs that the house needs, but we've had enough of house maintenance for now, and will leave the rest until next year.

Happy anniversary, house!

Replacing our bathroom....

It's coming up to ten years since we moved into our house in Cyprus. It's more than ten years since we first saw it, and pondered, and prayed, and decided that it was the right house to buy. As, indeed, the past decade has amply demonstrated.

But back in January 2006, we didn't know what to expect. We didn't really know what we were looking for although we had a few important criteria. At first we tried to find a four-bedroomed house, but they were too expensive in the area we wanted to live. So we started looking at three-bedroomed houses... only to have an estate agent take us a three-storey house which had three bedrooms on the ground floor, which is a separate flat, AND three bedrooms on the top floor, as well as a good-sized room off the living room which could be used as another bedroom.

We fell in love with the kitchen immediately, we saw lots of potential in the main living area, and although the bedrooms seemed a bit small compared to the ones in our rental home, we knew they would be fine.

But we really didn't like the bathroom.

It's not that it was too small, but there was a huge sink unit that seemed to take up almost half the floor space, and there was mould growing around the bath sealant (although everything else was scrupulously clean):

We really didn't like the colour, either. And whereas we could easily repaint other rooms (and did so before moving in) it's a lot more difficult to change bathroom tiles.

Thinking about the bathroom almost put us off the house entirely, but we went back for a second viewing. When we saw it again - and I took the above photo - we realised it wasn't as bad as we had remembered. We still didn't like the style or colours, but it was quite adequate; a great deal better than the one in our rental home (of which I don't think any of us ever took any photos).

Besides, with the amount we sold our UK house for, we had some 'change' when we went ahead with buying this one. We used some of it to buy important items such as a large freezer, and an electronic piano, and a television (since our previous one had quit some months previously), as well as a few extra bookcases. But we promised ourselves that once we'd settled in, we would do something about the bathroom.

Time, as it is wont to do, passed.

Richard replaced the sealant around the bath.

A few years ago, he managed to cut down the shower doors which were a bit broken and somewhat mouldy.

But it's continued to cause frustration. Nothing major, in the scheme of things, but it gets very damp, and the condensation turns to mould on the ceiling and wall tiles. I clean them regularly, but it grows back, and we don't always notice black on the ceiling. We could keep the window open, but it would be VERY cold in the winter. What it needs is an extractor fan... but that's not an easy thing to install without taking the bathroom apart.

The radiator, too, is extremely rusty. Each year it looks worse, and we wonder if it's going to leak. We muttered that it would be nice to have a heated towel rail...

We're not good at getting around to doing things, and time continued to pass, but we seriously needed a new shower on the ground floor (which we use as a guest apartment). The doors have been wonky since we moved in, and are getting worse. There's mould there too. And we have been given money specifically for the upkeep of the guest flat...

So at the end of last year, we started looking at new showers, and other bathroom fittings, curious to know what was available, and what the likely cost would be, and whether we would even be able to find anything suitable.

Finding a new shower for the guest flat wasn't too difficult, but we also wanted to know what might - theoretically - be possible in our main bathroom. We discussed having only a shower with no bath, to make it feel bigger. But occasionally we both like to take a bath, and it's important to have one for visiting children.

Visiting the bigger DIY stores was discouraging; nothing was inspiring, and we'd almost given up when we decided to look at a local bathroom supplies place. There we saw a corner bath, the kind of thing Richard had always rather craved, which would take up rather less space (or less awkward space, anyway) than our current bath.

We saw a sink we liked too, and Richard said he would be able to build a small, neat shelved unit to go around it.

I didn't think we needed a new loo; this is our current one:

But they're not expensive, and this one has a lot of scale (and needs a new seat lid anyway)... so we thought that if we were buying the rest new, we should go ahead with that, too.

We contacted the builder who has done some other work on the house, and he gave us a quotation for doing the entire bathroom - removing all the tiles and old units, plumbing in the new ones to our specifications, re-painting the ceiling, doing any necessary plastering, putting up tiles... at least a week's expert work. It wasn't cheap but not unreasonable either.

Richard was eager to go ahead, but I was still resistant. Partly because I have an inherent dislike of spending money on myself (part of my Scottish heritage, perhaps) and also partly because I find it extremely stressful having builders in the house, no matter how friendly and efficient they are. There's inevitable noise, and dust, and chaos... I really, really dislike it.

But I'd been wanting to spend a couple of weeks in the UK visiting relatives, as it's over a year since we've been, and so the idea formed that I would go on my own, and Richard would get the bathroom done in my absence.

The vague idea turned to more concrete plans in the past month. My flights and other travel arrangements are booked, and one of our bedrooms is currently full of bathroom fittings and fixtures. We've chosen tiles and paint, and the builders are booked for this week. They're going to replace the guest flat shower first, and that should have been happening today.

This morning Richard had a message to say that they're going to start a day late. They're still finishing a previous job that took longer than expected.

I can't say I'm unhappy about that. That means they'll do the guest flat shower tomorrow, and probably won't start work on the main part of the house until Wednesday, by which time I'll be a few thousand kilometres away.

The only slight problem is that the heated towel rail (to replace the rusty radiator) was not in stock when Richard put the order in, so had to be ordered from abroad. And last week there was a port strike in Limassol. I gather it's now been called off, so we hope that shipments will be unpacked and will make their way to the relevant stores in time for us, and for the many other frustrated customers awaiting bathroom and other parts.

Tomorrow morning I'll take my last shower in the present bathroom. I don't think I'll have any regrets... it's served us well for the past ten years, but I'm not going to miss it.

Rain and Bridge Repairs...

Shortly after my last post, Sheila and I were on our usual four kilometre walk to the aqueduct and back, only to find that we couldn't actually get to the aqueduct:

Well, we could perhaps have ducked under the tape and crossed the bridge (which had been getting more and more broken and rickety) but not being Cypriots we tend to follow what notices tell us (usually, anyway...).  So we went a little way along where the arrow sent us, but it just ended up at the main road:

So we walked back, and instead looked at the lake, which was looking quite a bit fuller after the first real rain of the year:

Unfortunately, although October usually signals the start of Autumn, the weather remained hot, and the sky mostly cloudless. It was even a bit humid sometimes. But then, a few days ago, I saw plenty of clouds in the sky, so took my camera with me in the hope of seeing a pretty sunrise.

I thought this one was very attractive, although a photo is a poor imitation:

The bridge was still out of action, and evidently some repair work had been started. The old wood was removed, although not very far, and new metal railings were in place.

They seem to have been painted alternately brown and light blue, which looks decidedly weird, but perhaps it's a bit of creative undercoat. The planks being put down to walk on look stronger than the old ones, too:

On Thursday evening, there was quite a thunderstorm and heavy rain. Friday was quite muggy, and then on Saturday there was a lot of rain. There was more this morning, and more predicted.

It's odd how often the last week of October is rainy here in Cyprus. It's usually the October half-term break in the UK, and families have often been disappointed that it's as wet here as it is back home, the only difference being that it's rather warmer in Cyprus. Temperatures are still 26-28C during the daytime, so although I wore long trousers today, for the first time since June, I still wore sandals, and nothing thicker than a tee shirt.

Repairing an elderly clock

Many, many years ago we visited my parents when they were living in the Middle East. And they happened to have a clock with what I thought were Arabic numerals on the face. (It turns out that the numbers we use in the West are actually Arabic numerals, and the ones on this clock - the ones used in Arabic writing - are in fact Hindi numerals. However that's not relevant to this post, but if anyone is curious, the link in the last sentence takes you to the Wiki page that explains in full.)

Anyway,we admired this clock very much, and Richard decided it would be a good idea for us to have one. Not long afterwards, we managed to acquire one. My memory is hazy: did we buy it, or was it a gift? I have no idea. But Richard thinks it was probably around 23 years ago.

So. The clock hung in our Birmingham house - in the living room, if I recall correctly - for some years. Then we moved to Cyprus, and it either stayed on the wall or went into storage. It finally moved here too when we sold our house, but I don't think we ever hung it at our old house; I can't find any photos of it, anyway, until this one, taken in 2006, shortly after we moved to the house where we now live:

That's the clock on the wall, looking square and fitting really quite nicely, where we could glance at it as we relaxed in the evening, or came in by the front door (which is opposite). 

So as to show the Arabic (or Hindu) style of numbers on the clock, here's a closer view, which was taken six-and-a-half years later, in 2012, when I was actually photographing our display of Christmas cards (mostly cropped out of this):

If you click the image, a larger view should appear; the back button (or X if it appears that way) should bring you back to the blog.

So, for some years our square clock stayed unobtrusively on the wall, informing us of the time. Occasionally a visitor would notice and comment (a popular question was whether the hands went backwards - thankfully not!).  Once, one of the cats, running along the wooden shelf below, got annoyed by the ticking second-hand and managed to knock the whole thing down, destroying the glass cover and slightly bending one of the hands.

But the clock kept working reliably. All it required in terms of maintenance was a new AA battery, perhaps once a year. It let us know when this was necessary by running slow.

I suppose it was six months ago that I went to change the battery, and realised that it had only been a few weeks since it last needed one. Perhaps, I thought with a shrug, it had been an old battery. So I made sure that I took a new one out of a packet, and replaced it, resetting the clock as usual.

It was fine for a month or so, then suddenly it was an hour slow again. Maybe, we thought, it was trying to adjust to daylight savings by itself... but we didn't worry too much. We kept an eye on it, and it continued being exactly an hour slow, so eventually we put it right, and it was fine. For another month or two... then one morning I got up and it was an hour slow again.

We left it this time. We got used to it. We learned to adapt our view of the correct time, taking account of the clock being an hour slow. Then, one morning, it was an hour and a half slow.  It was becoming a little annoying, but we thought we could adjust to that too. I found myself regularly looking at the clock on the other side of the door to check the time, but we would have got used to that too.. until the day when it was six hours slow.

So Tim said it was too confusing, and we should take it down. I suggested that perhaps the time had come to buy a new clock, but Richard likes this clock very much, and said that he would prefer to get it mended. He found that it was easy to remove the little square black mechanism that powered the clock. He said it had probably got worn out - it's not something we've ever noticed happening before, but then we don't have many 23-year-old clocks.

He looked online, and discovered that we could buy a replacement mechanism for two or three pounds from eBay in the UK. Of course, postage would be added to that, and it would be a few weeks before it arrived if we ordered one, so we thought we might see if something of the sort could be bought locally.

We walked into town on Friday, and did a few other errands, then we walked along one of the main streets, looking for a suitable shop. There are such a hotch-potch of different shops in Larnaka: here are a few that we went past:

At one watch shop, a woman was outside and asked if she could help. We showed her the mechanism, and she said that she didn't have one, but that if we wanted, she would phone her husband who was in Limassol, and he would bring one. Typically friendly and helpful - but we didn't really want to wait around for hours, and weren't sure that it would be the right thing anyway. So we thanked her, and said we would look elsewhere. She told us to come back if we didn't find it.

A few doors along, we saw a small shop with several clocks on the back wall. So we went inside and a very friendly man with excellent English took a quick look at the mechanism, and within a few seconds produced something looking almost identical. It had a longer bit sticking out - he asked if our clock had glass on it or was open, and when we said there was no glass (we never did get round to replacing it after the cat incident) he said it would be fine. 

I should, of course, have asked what price it was at that point. He had simply produced it, and we hadn't taken up much of his time. But we didn't think about it. And then he was rooting about on his shelves again, and returned with some plastic bags, from which he produced three clock hands; he said we would probably need new hands to attach to the new mechanism, and explained how to file them down if they were too long. 

Then he showed Richard how there was a slightly different way of fixing the mechanism into the back of the clock... and said that if he had any trouble we should take it back, and he would do it. And he told us that our old mechanism made the second-hand tick round, but the new one would go around smoothly without any ticks. Was that a problem? No, we said, that would be fine. 

He didn't got quite as far as to offer us coffee, but - such is the friendliness of the Cypriot that we felt welcomed and cared for.

Finally, as he was packing the things up, I asked him how much it would cost. I hoped three euros, expected five, maybe six.

'Ten euro', he said with a smile. 

It felt like a lot for a little mechanism that probably only cost a euro or two, but it was probably cheaper than buying a new clock. I wondered if we could have haggled, but by that stage it didn't feel right.  

So we smiled back, and I handed over a ten-euro note, and thanked him. 

I guess it's good to support the local economy where possible.... 

When we got home, Richard had to file the side of the clock very slightly but it fitted perfectly, and the new hands work just as we were told, with the second hand now gliding smoothly: 

It's quite disturbing to find that the clock is telling the correct time... but I'm sure we will get used to it. 

If it's another 23 years before we need to replace the mechanism again, we will be in our late seventies....!