Yzzy

Well I just want a big slopy bucket with wheels! For pennies.. I dont care if it has a picture of a cat eating strawberries on it or a builders ass crack on it!! Gimme cheap!!!! I'm guessing this one is good and a good deal?? https://www.diy.com/departments/verve-black-85l-wheelbarrow/1610089_BQ.prd

Finally family have flown home... I had no idea how addicted I was already to this darn house!! I am now grabbing a cup of coffee and window shopping for Wheelbarrows... i had no idea there were so many types!

Other end... we are South East!

Hi, sorry we've had family staying since last week and I've had to endure the dreaded task of showing them around London sights and Essex sights and my legs are about ready to fall off!! So haven't had a chance to log in and reply.... The actual brickwork of the house seems (so far) to be in very good condition, so would make no sense to re-build... we did consider it though. Garden was huge but a previous owner sold off the back in circa. 1901 when the original builder who bought the plot of land in 1876 moved in at last and then died, so we assume his Widow sold the land to raise funds. The 'Steptoe & Son' characters at the back wouldn't have the money to buy anything anyway and would only fill it with smelly rusty cars... lmao!!!

Oohhhh excellent! Cheers.

The neighbours directly behind us should either know by now as the leaves are pretty unmistakable, not to mention the fruit..... and if they haven't guessed then they are dim t be honest! They don't have a garden, they have a yard full of various 'project' cars that never seem to move and they walk about in string vests and trousers that seem to be always teasing onlookers with white hairy buttocks!! Thanks for all the tips... I will try what I can and kill the beasts, will take some better photos and keep a prognosis report going... lol !!!

I don't mean to... I'm one of these people that rather than sit and explain for 2 hours what I want done I'm already pulling on gloves and half way through it before anyone has asked if I need help. The trees though..... they can be done by someone else... I am scared of chainsaws.

Oh dear!

YES SIR! ( I think I will be needing many kicks up the padding before December!)

Already suffering that one @Jml..... £274 a month!

VERY interesting and will be used well thank you! Now to get the EPO to write that letter!

I know I am!! VERY lucky.... only one more week of stupid amounts of black bags though and then I will be getting skips as I am NOT bagging up pigeon poo rubbish and dragging that up and down stairs... My vision is to have a skip with a chute out the window and weeeeeeee... bye bye rubbish! But for some odd reason Skip hire firms don't hire chutes??? You have to hire them separate?

Oohhh what's this? I've never heard of that before!

I think I'll leave the services side fo things to professionals... I don't fancy turning on the tap one day and getting electrocuted or gassed! It's awfully sad isn't it @Onoff? I wish it was just clothes and tat, she literally didn't thrown ANYTHING away from 2001 until I forced her to move out in 2014.. every newspaper, every letter, every magazine, every food container ever emptied and washed was kept... just in case.... if a supermarket was selling something at 50% off she would buy 20 of said item, even if she didn't need it... it would be stored... just in case... everything wood was brought back to the house and stored in the front room... just in case she needed wood for the fireplace. So far no 'body fluids' though so i really feel for you there :-( Tackle it now! One thing I said to Mother when I demanded control of the house was I didn't want to one day be not only dealing with losing her but also having to empty my childhood home of ruined belongings.... I doubt it has stopped her hoarding (she wont let me in her flat) but it convinced her to hand the house over. My one joy is the refuse collection guys, they are utter DARLINGS, they spotted me outside the house at the beginning of January putting black bags into our car. After asking me what was going on I said I was clearing the house out and had another 100 bags inside the house and they all jumped up, ran in and grabbed the lot for the truck!! Now every week I put out between 100 and 200 black bags on my drive and they are more than happy to trash the lot... I do however furnish them with boxes of biscuits!

Here's the above section after I snipped and chopped my short-assed way through it....

Hiya, not sure if anyone on here has any experience or advice but.... back in 2003 Mother announced "I got fig trees to grow from stones! I'm going to plant them along the back of the garden" I went nuts and begged her not to, explained how big they grow, how their roots shoot off and sprout new trees everywhere etc etc. Anyway, fell on deaf ears and now I own the house and OH MY GOODNESS!!! Six or could be seven HUGE twisting fig trees now tower over the garden, they've grown through the brick built summer house and ruined it, they've shot up through the lawn... It's a nightmare! Now I am thinking get someone in with a chainsaw and get them down to stumps but will this work? Is the garden doomed? I spent a couple of hours outside last week snipping and sawing off as much as I could reach but the tops of the trees are above roof height! I dread to think how far the roots have spread. This 'problem' is the one thing that could have me hanging up my gloves and saying bye bye to the house. The trunks of these trees are a twisted around each other leaving some about 4 foot wide!

Ha ha!!! I love that!

I forgot to add.... The stuff that was hoarded was pilled up in stacks. The chaos was created when asshats broke in and raided the place twice. The turned everything over, ripped through boxes and bags and basically trashed the place. Couple that with damp and pigeons and we have the Mother of all Messes we see now.

Oh my word so many questions! lol OK I'll try and answer them all in one go. The house has been empty for 3 years, pigeons have squatted there for at least 18 months. The house was literally left with everything in it, and more as the previous resident (Mother) was a mega hoarder. Doing it up to 'hopefully' live in again. I have no money apart from £2k and no idea where I can get any more from, either way, the house HAS to be emptied of everything regardless of if I carry on and refurb' or sell. So regardless of what people call me, crazy, deluded etc I have to carry on going there every day and shovel everything out until it is empty. The fuses are the old wire ones. Yes I plugged an MCB in. I wasn't at the house when it tripped so nothing that I 'did' tripped it.... however, as I clear out each room I am finding every conceivable electrical item the previous resident had is still plugged in and ON, some of them plugged in to extensions plugged into another extension box... seriously insane but I'm not going to make myself ill trying to figure out why and how she didn't burn the place down, I'll just get my head down, empty the house and unplug stuff haha... I've not done anything that would disturb any of the wiring yet so it's not that. There is a serious leak in the flat roof conservatory area so it may be water in that light fitting / switch? I've only just emptied that room (well I have one more wall unit to empty) so the switch there hasn't been disconnected yet. Piggy backing... I was told that back in the day as more electrical items entered homes lazy sparks would pull up floorboards and wire plug sockets for upstairs to the downstairs light system rather than chase out walls or whatever. This is what I have been told to look out for upstairs but I haven't cleared my way to any of the rooms there so have no idea if this is the case or not. As far as my memory serves me I believe my Dad had the whole house checked / re-wired as needed when we moved in in 1979. The only 'incident' I can think of is back in about 2010 my eldest was in the house talking to Mother when the dimmer switch behind her started to spark and it blew the fuse and it was never fixed / touched again until I had the dimmer switch removed a couple of weeks ago on my quest to figure out the light system fault. Mother also says she had the water turned off as there was a leak "from upstairs in the loft" but she isn't any more forthcoming with ideas of where this was or where it leaked to. I'll not be able to figure that out until I break through the crap and find the upstairs! (The lighst work up there though!) The house will need some new floorboards to the ground floor, central heating fitted throughout, I think all the ceilings upstairs will have to come out as I don't fancy 'cleaned up' pigeon poo wood above my bedroom, it stinks as it is and I should imagine it's well in the wood. Eventually I'd like new windows but that isn't a priority. That will be a 'once we get a mortgage' type job. My mission by December is to completely empty the house, remove all floor coverings and wall coverings, then once I have the skeleton to get someone in and asses the condition of the house / electrics / waterworks / gas. Once I can see how bad or good it is I can then decide on my next move. This used to be my home, my Dad died in that house, it's a very emotional process I am going through having to bag up mountains and mountains of rancid rubbish, memories, photographs, ... I have to do all of this while not thinking about why she did this to the house or how could she live that way or worry about chucking ruined photographs away. I have to block all emotions off and set my mind to EMPTY mode. Why did I join this forum? Because I will be wanting to tinker with things and I will need expert help and after looking at various sites I deced this one looked the friendliest and like somewhere I could ask daft questions and not get too ribbed! My first action was to sit down and write a year plan. I assigned a room to a month. I started January 1st. So far I have already completed 3 rooms, almost done the kitchen and conservatory and have one room untouched downstairs. So I am roughly up to where I thought I would be in April... not bad considering it's me on my own during the week and with hubby for 7 hours at the weekends! Below is an example of one corner of the kitchen.... The whole house is like this and worse. You can just about see the stove, the cupboards from the wall behind the stove fell off and the ceiling above has fallen in, I haven't even tried to go in to the bathroom above as the floor looks sunken.

Actually, I've read that pigeon poopies is highly flammable and is harvested in some countries as fuel! I won't be doing that either I hasten to add! lol Right, I need to grab my DM's and go to the house to put 200 black rubbish bags out for the trash men!

Electrobabble sounds good! The house has an old Wylex system and the electrics all work apart from the ground floor light ring, it keeps blowing the fuse wire, sometimes after an hour, sometimes as soon as I flick the main switch on (making me poop myself!).... So I took off all the dimmer switches in the downstairs thinking it may be them, no joy, deactivated the switches to the kitchen tube lights, no joy.... added a MCB to see if that would help for a while and it did... for about 18 hours and it's not working again and I daren't try anything else as I don't fancy a singed barnet! So now I drag an angle-poise lamp around with me as I clear out the downstairs. Once I have some ££ I'll 'get a guy in' to figure out what's what. Although I know 'back in the day' they would save time and piggy back upstairs sockets on to the light ring so it might be that???

Hmm photos will have to wait, I'm half way through brushing my 8 year old dreadlocks out and look like a stressed witch! Some more info then... I'm a Mum of 5 a 'young' Grandmother of 2 (they call me Bubble though as I couldn't face being called Grandmother in my 40's!!) married to a red neck Arkansan, 3 cats (one preggers we think) 3 guinea pigs and a tiny midget floofy white rabbit..... We did have hens but Mr Fox decided they looked better without heads... they didn't.... so I'm waiting until the garden in the house is ready to build a fox proof chookery and get more.

Oh my goodness yes indeed.... So far downstairs was minimal guano so a simple f2 mouth mask was worn. But for upstairs I will be getting a fancy shmancy mask with the filters on the sides... yup.. I know all the technical words! lmao

Hmm well I'm a veggie so no ha ha!