PHEW!
A lot has gone in since last posting here. First and foremost we’re living Scotland! Following the demands of work (as CEO of Ruffian Games) we now live in Monifieth on the outskirts of Dundee. We ended up in the house we thought we’d be beaten to (as detailed in the Full Infuriate post in December). Which is great except it took paying a good few months in advance and a bit of gazumping. Not nice but to be honest I’m glad it all worked out and we’re living where we are.
What hasn’t worked out so well in what happened to our house on Southampton. It was sitting empty about to be rented out when the header tank in the roof burst during the recent cold spell. The end results weren’t nice at all; Charlie’s room bore the brunt of it and there’s considerable water damage throughout the rest of the house. And the double whammy is we didn’t have buildings insurance.
My assumption that it’d auto-renew as part of our insurance was a stupid one. We had contents insurance but that will only help with replacing the carpets. Everything else we’re going to have to pay for ourselves and that’s going to be hard.
It’s put a bit of strain on us to be honest and that’s compounded by having to try and deal with everything by remote control from the other end of the country. Here’s what the ceiling of Charlie’s room currently looks like:
Oof.
Luckily Gareth’s put us in touch with an awesome builder who’s overseeing getting everything back up to spec. Will’s project managing it all and is doing a cracking job. It’s been a pretty rotten month on the personal front to be honest but at least the way through it is starting to come into view.
And last (and certainly not least) we’ve some extremely awesome friends; Michelle has helped far beyond what could reasonably be expected of anyone. She managed to rally a group of Soton friends to come round and help clear the worst of the initial prior to Will coming in. Special thanks to Michelle, Mich, Shelly, Mark, Sparky and Derek. How awesome is that?
So that’s the good and bad. And work. It’s awesome but unfortunately still in the domain of things that I can say very little about. What I can say is all out there on the web. Some info here:
- Our Website for stuff about the company
- Google for some of the press we’ve got recently
- Facebook for our cheesy fan page
Ouch. Having a leaking roof to deal with at the moment myself on the house, I can share some of your pain.
Something similar happened to my parents neighbours, where they went away for the weekend and came back to find that they’d had the ceiling in the loft fill with water, then the whole lot came down almost at once, and ruined both ground and first floor of the house.
The ceiling tiles were also found to be asbestos, so you can imagine how that added to cost of the cleanup when the builder worked out how much he was charging. I don’t know whether you can “write off” a house, but they’re still working on it now, more than six months after they turned their house into a aquarium..
Comment by arron — January 26, 2009 @ 5:07 pm
Ooof. Well I’m quite glad to report we didn’t have a loft chock full of poisonous materials.
Then again my CD collection was up there and some of that’s none too nice
Comment by admin — January 26, 2009 @ 5:39 pm
Good thing is, I got to use my massive hammer
With finesse, of course.
Comment by Mark — January 27, 2009 @ 8:56 pm
You might have been going through a rough patch but at the end of the day you have a wife a son and a nice little family and you can’t really have anything better than that.
Let’s hope from now on in the rest of 2009 is a good one for you all.
Comment by Paul — January 27, 2009 @ 9:12 pm