Ten days after flooding

Ten days after flooding in Soggibottom cottage and one thing is back to normal.

The bear is back in his usual place in the window.
Freya and the cottage bear are both watching Sid in the garden. Freya is taking more interest than the bear.
Sid is a cheeky squirrel who loves to sit on the other side of the window and torment Freya. At least he keeps her occupied. He also has a good technique of unhooking the bird feeders from the tree outside. His normal trick is to carry them off in his mouth to the other side of the stream.

Our fire is the latest casualty of our flood. We couldn't get an engineer to look at it until yesterday.
The weather has turned colder, seems everyone suddenly needs their fire to be serviced.
When the guy came he decided to condemn the fire because of water damage.It was un serviceable, unworkable. Ten days since flooding from the stream and there are still things going out of the front door. Ten days doesn't seem a very long time but enough time to make things on our fire already corrode.

I suppose it would have been a different story if the water had been clean.

 

Good idea about trying to clean the bag I showed you last time. 

Although, I don't think my grandmother would have wanted me to have kept it after it smelt as if it had been dropped in sewage. Actually, it wasn't dropped, the water with other things was floating around in here. So thanks for all the good advice guys. You would have had to worn rubber gloves to knit with the needles. The bin has been binned too.

Also thanks for advice on unblocking drains. IF we ever have a blocked drain :-), I promise to give detailed instructions on how to unblock it. We do have a main drain that all the waste water from  inside the cottage goes into, but all of our surface water from the cottage goes straight into soak-a-ways, then the water goes straight into the stream. No surface drains with covers this side of our little bridge. other than one main drain.Quirk of living here, as well as getting our feet wet.

Seems as Freya is making the most of our new sitting room.  Princess and the pea came to mind.
A concrete floor isn't the warmest thing to have to sit on and it really is getting colder outside. Luckily the floor that was damaged had a very good liner underneath.  The lining saved most (not all) of the concrete from getting too wet.

That's it, as far as the ten days after the flood up date goes Things from now tend to move slowly.

This is a spot on the other side of the village from the cottage. Seems a bit strange that the photo is taken at the top of a hill, we can't all be lucky enough to live down here at the bottom.

This is one of my favorite views, even if it is on the other side of the village. Glorious Dartmoor in the background.

Not one of my better shots, great looking lamp post Midge. I've really out done my self getting that into the picture.
The photo does show you how close we are to Dartmoor, right at the bottom of the hill. All that water has to go somewhere. The environment agency have photo's of our flood, it really is just a waiting game now. I have already said that.

In the meantime, we have another project in mind to keep us busy over the next few days. I really have to change the setting on the camera.Oh, look at that dirty fireplace... shame on me.

Now is the ideal opportunity to re-make our fire place. I said re-make, what we really intend is, to knock it out and start again.
Some of it we can't take out, bits at the back will have to stay as they are part of the cottage, or are they ?

You never know exactly what you find here until you start knocking things down, or tapping the wall. You should have seen us when we first arrived here. Ah, well, here we go again.

At one time it would have been a bigger fireplace, this concrete monstrosity has been left over from the cottage's past owners. I have always hated it. It's dangerous too. The past owners had a thing about concrete, but to tell you about our garden will be for another day.
The fireplace isn't even in the middle of the room. The best thing about it, is the beam above the stone and concrete, the beam we reclaimed when we first moved in.
The beam was covered in layers and layers of black paint. It took weeks of hard work to uncover the beautiful oak beam underneath gunge. Then years of old fashioned elbow grease and polish.

We're keeping the beam...... at least one bear is exactly where he should be.

I haven't be able to visit your beautiful blogs over the last few days. I have gone missing again......It might be a while longer before I can be completely updated.
Tomorrow it's going to be too dusty for a computer mouse to be around. Although first we have to source two more upright wooden beams.

Hope you all take care and thank you so very much, we both appreciate all your good thoughts and helpful comments. Most of all, it's good to know your there. We like sharing things. :-) But never ever want anyone to get their feet wet when it's all so unnecessary  This shouldn't have happened again after we tried so hard to improve things that we were never flooded again.

Freya is over at Catflap Cavalier, she has been a little star while all this has been going on, even if she does hog all the floor cushions...See you all in a few days, or sooner with luck. x x x