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Cracked in Lockdown

2K views 29 replies 10 participants last post by  ronan 
#1 ·
Oh thank you God! Thank you very much indeed.

Here we are in a lockdown, four adults in a house, isolated successfully for over four weeks, not so much as setting foot in a shop. We do not want things breaking down and plumbers or electricians having to call.

Yesterday the sink cracked. Yes, the kitchen sink. And no, I’ve never heard of a sink cracking before. But it has, and it leaks.

Ranted on here once about Wren Kitchens who, after lousy service, provided a lousy tap which I threw away and replaced. But we kept the sink, which has now cracked.

Daughter suggested covering the crack with Sellotape. Old-fashioned look from moi. Then the lavatory blocked. Thank you God! Out to garage for drain plunger. Hang on. Over there on the shelf is an ancient remnant of gutter repair tape, kept who-knows-why.

Also an (unused) cat litter tray. Why did I have one of those? We have never had a cat. Perfect fit as a bowl inside the sink.

So we might survive for a time, with taped up sink and cat’s bowl, before we have to fit a new sink. No thanks to God.

To reassure Christians, Jews and Muslims: it’s not your God I’m complaining about. It’s author Michael Frayn’s George God, the god of the mundane and annoying, who rots your floorboards and fails your Alfa’s MAF sensor.
 
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#5 ·
We have had a leaky kitchen sink drain plug for months....I have indeed sellotaped it....and it works....though we have a bowl under the sink which we have to empty once a week....one day I will get it fixed....but am too damned lazy.
 
#8 ·
A few years ago, an unfortunate incident made a hole in both our bath and Mrs K's knee. Due to a plumber being a monumental bell end it would have been out of action for a matter of weeks were it not for the miracle of gaffer tape. It sealed it so well that I suggested buying a while rol, reinforcing it with a dollop of instant wheelarch, and calling it fixed.
 
#10 ·
Our front door is currently sporting a bit of colour matched gaffer tape. It got cracked whilst shifting some furniture. It was scheduled for repair in May but the insurance company have cancelled due to lockdown.

All you need is gaffer tape and WD40. If it moves and it shouldn't, gaffer tape. If it doesn't move and it should.....
 
#12 ·
I am deeply touched by the responses, and heartened to know so many of us are enthusiastic about bowl-jobs.

Next big task is to find a sink which fits the orifice. Needless to say, there are certain common sizes and mine isn't one of them. And I need to measure my orifice, which is difficult to reach without contorting myself in unpleasant places.
 
#13 ·
Ive been steadily cleaning out the pipes under the sink and I though I'd finished but when I turned the cold tap on the mixer to check for leaks I found it leaking back through the hot tap. Fortunately my son-in-law who fitted the kitchen 6 years ago fitted on/off valves in the pipes so I was able to remove the hot tap valve without any fuss. The as I've been busy doing a major sort out of drawers, cupboards, rooms and tools I remembered I had a brand new spare. Fitted a dream with no problems. Result!
Just rubbing it in.
 
#14 ·
That would have been an absolute god-send, I wish whoever had put my kitchen in had done so. Although its approaching sixty years since my kitchen was installed, I guess back then most people were probably more than capable of doing all their own plumbing.
 
#15 ·
The first house I bought, well paid a mortgage on, was owned by a plumber and every single supply pipe had a stop ****. The decorations however were atrocious, layer upon layer of wall paper made worse by layers of gloss paint. Took ages to get off and the plaster followed rapidly, it was the old horsehair reinforced type. To give you an idea of how long ago that was it cost £14 995 and was quite large with a garage, a 30 year old air raid shelter from WW2 and a large back garden. It needed a lot of work as did a subsequent house so this one only needed decorating as I was fed up with living in a building site.
 
#16 ·
If the air raid shelter was 30 years old then you are presumably talking about 1969 when £15k was a lot of money. In 1968 our first home (a 3 bed bungalow) cost £3100. Sold in 1973 for £8,500. Inflation was high in the '70s wasn't it?
 
#18 ·
Wow, your house went up in price by 175% in the space of 5 years, that is an incredible rate of gain. Would be like a £250k house these days appreciating to nearly £700k in the space of 5 years. Can you remember what rate you were paying on your mortgage then?
 
#17 · (Edited)
Should've been 35 years, my error, which makes it 1976. The shelter wasn't a corrugated steel one covered with earth but a 4" thick reinforced concrete one with a blast blocker and I think was made in 1941. So I think the owners then either had money or influence or both. It took a lot to get rid of it, necessary as it was right in the middle of the lawn.
The bad time for high interest rates was in the last couple of years of the 80s into the 90s. I went into serious negative equity in the 90s despite putting a 50% deposit on a house in 88.
 
#19 ·
The bad time for high interest rates was in the last couple of years of the 80s into the 90s. I sent into serious negative equity in the 90s despite putting a 50% deposit on a house in 88.
Makes the last fifteen years seem fairly sedate. You had some real volatility back then. I was a kid in the 80s, my parents just managed to keep the house by the skin of their teeth, although my dad's building company went to the wall, and their relationship never really recovered.
 
#20 ·
Just looked up to find out how much it is 'worth' now. Could only find the house next door which didn't have even 2/5 the garden area or a garage, mine was a corner plot with enough space on the side to build another house but there was a building line covenant to prevent that. One next door went for £550 000 two years ago.
 
#21 ·
As Armoore say the 80's were the really high inflation and I do remember interest rates went up to 14% or maybe a little more.
One reason for the increase was we lived in Market Deeping just across the county boundary from the Soke of Peterborough. At that time the Peterborough Development Corporation had just got up and running to develop the city into a large London overspill area. Local planning permissions were all geared to the PDC so if you didn't want to live in a "new town" environment you needed to buy outside the area in Lincolnshire where the PDC influence was non-existant. Market Deeping was the nearest village to Peterborough and so property values accelerated. The only time I benefited from property inflation
 
#23 ·
My parents were apparently paying 21% on their mortgage - not sure if that's true or not but that is as my mum remembers it. It was their first house and so they didn't put down a huge deposit, but they bought fairly close to the bottom of the market before everything started to take off.
 
#22 ·
Just checked and it sold in 2016 for £210k and last September the other semi sold for £233k Nos 1&2 The Woodlands (ours was 2)
 
#24 ·
I remember that one year when pay rise time came round inflation was running at 16%. The company said they could not afford that sort of level of increase so they changed (permanently) the holiday entitlement from 20 days to 25 days but allowed us to commute 5 days for cash after the end of the holiday year. Pay rise that year was, from memory, 12%. Some years later a new MD decided that every one was working too hard and, being unaware of the background, decided that we should take our full holiday entitlement and no longer be able to commute it.

Thinking about it again it may be I was wrong on the sale price for the bungalow. £8,500 may well have been the purchase price at Kings Lynn so the bungalow would have been less (but not a lot less perhaps £7k+). The KL house was sold in 1977 at a time when property sales were very slow. I had been made redundant again and moved to Scunthorpe. Sale was £10,500 and purchase £11,250. Eighteen months later the prices in Lynn had risen significantly faster than Scunny and we could not have afforded to move back. When moved once more after that and the current 4 bed detached (where we have been 34 years) is probably worth 75% of that original 3 bed bungalow and likely to fall in value if the steel industry suffers a further recession on the back of Covid-19 and the Chinese owners give up on the Scunthorpe Plant.

Did your parents ever mention mortgage rationing. At times it was difficult to get a mortgage which prevented house price inflation exceeding general inflation. However once the government lifted financial controls house prices rocketed hence the situation we find ourselves in today with young people unable to afford a home. That original bungalow was less than 4x my salary at 21. At it's current value that would mean a 21yr old earning over £60k pa
 
#25 ·
My parents never mentioned it but I've read about it. There were lots of weird things like that in the 80s to keep inflation under control, or one aspect of inflation like house prices or salaries. But really the problem was too much demand in the economy and constrained supply. Increasing interest rates to prevent borrowing-to-spend and to promote the saving rather than spending of earned-income is only ever slightly effective in reducing demand. And it has the negative effect of increasing the costs of borrowing for capital expenditure (expensive and risky to borrow to invest in productive capacity), so the rate of growth in supply slows at the same time as the rate in demand growth slows. Dealing with this was all new for bankers in the Eighties, they had little experience in the fiat-money system, being used to banking in a world of the Gold standard and Bretton Woods fixed exchange system.

Ironically we have been struggling with deflation (in a sense) since 2010, where interest rates have been low worldwide which has allowed the supply of goods to keep growing faster than demand has grown in the economy.

With regard to the differences in house price inflation in different areas, the house I sold in Leighton Buzzard in 2014 made more money in the two years after I sold it than I did! The house I bought in Cumbria in 2014 barely changed price at all in the time I owned it, from 2014 to 2018. If I'd stuck in my ex council house in Bedfordshire for another 4 years, I'd have been able to buy my current house in Cumbria outright in 2018. Hindsight eh?!
 
#26 ·
During the 70's, well before I came along, my eldest sister had health issues resulting in being partially sighted amongst other things. Becuase of this, needing special schooling and other expensive things my parents defaulted on their mortgage and spent a short while living in a caravan in my grandparents garden. I can't remember the exact figure they told me, but the overall value of that mortgage was around the £1500 mark. That's what you could easily have for a monthly repayment these days! Ad it was enough to be unpayable for them. That's always the example (I guess because it's somewhat personal) that really speaks to me about the different world it was then.
 
#28 ·
Mine was in Bromley. Nothing of importance nearby but along the road there were newer properties to replace houses bombed during the blitz. As you're near Orpington you might know of the significance of Kynaston Road and the final bombing by a V weapon.
Where we used to go scrumping at Scadbury there was a line of bomb holes, now gone, and the only two nearby possible targets were Queen Mary's Hospital (old site) and Crittal Windows where my mum operated a lathe making fuse caps for shells. I don't think she took it personally!
 
#29 ·
After a triumphant two weeks operating under the toughest conditions, I can now reveal Sterzo's Patented Bowl Dangler, the solution to all cracked sinks.

Plastic washing basin, fitted with the cheapest available plastic basin waste. The threaded part of the waste has been sawn off so the pipe dangles in the sink plug-hole. Separating the metal plug-hole from the plastic waste by the thickness of the bowl (2mm) meant there's not enough thread on the cheap screw to tighten it up. Why would that stop a genius? Upper and lower parts are glued in place with bathroom sealant. British engineering at its best.


Sink Plumbing fixture Bathroom sink Kitchen sink Drain


and the dangler, with Sellotaped sink crack behind:

Technology Electronic device
 
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