Five years ago, this happened in our house at 2 o’clock in the morning…
I found it and attempted to put the fire out, which as all good boy-scouts know, you should never do. There are people out there who are a lot better trained at firefighting than you… Anyhow, by the time the fire-fighters were called, the smoke was now too thick for Tracy, Jake & the dog to get down the stairs and too thick for me to get back up there to get them, which is about the time that the chilling harsh reality of the situation really kicked in 😯 I had actually told Tracy what was happening in our kitchen, but in her semi-conscious stake she’d told me to ‘leave it until the morning!!!’ And it wasn’t until I foolishly opened our backdoor (to let the smoke escape, which instead just fanned the flames) and watched in horror as our entire kitchen ignited 😯 that I realised how serious the situation was.
By the time the fire-fighters arrived, Tracy, Jake and our dog had to be rescued from our bedroom window and looking back, this was a hugely entertaining part of what was a very surreal night; Tracy was wearing hardly anything, the dog pissed all over the poor fireman who had to carry him down the ladder, the rest of the fire-fighters thought I was just some passerby rubbernecking at a bit of local excitement and less than an hour after the fire was out the local press & TV arrived!!! But anyway, back to that window…
Earlier in the year we noticed that our now infamous bedroom window was somehow jammed shut, which in light of what I’ve just told you and as we now have another tiny person in the house is clearly not good (not that we’re planning a repeat of 2004 I hasten to add!!!). Yesterday in true Bob the Builder style I set about fixing the problem… After about 90 minutes of twisting, screwing, unscrewing, pulling, pushing and not to mention a little bit of bashing we now had an opened bedroom window 🙂 The only slight downside to this achievement (and yes I did feel hugely proud to have ‘fixed’ it) was that something I’d done had somehow jammed to locking mechanism open; which meant that our bedroom window now didn’t close 😯 This situation was now a lot worse that it was before!!! Having an open bedroom window with a very inquisitive 2 year old, not to mention a hugely stupid Springer Spaniel is not good. I needed to fix it…
With Sawyer safely tucked up in bed I spent the night trawling the Web for information on UPVC locking mechanisms (as you do!!!) and let’s just say the results were complicated!!! Would this mean we’d have to ‘get a man in’ to fix it? Surely Bob wouldn’t give up that easily? Of course he wouldn’t. I decided to sleep on it… Tracy on the other hand, convinced that our dog would be stupid enough (a fair point really) to jump out of our bedroom window, didn’t really get a lot of sleep and instead decided to tire a length of cord around the window at 5 o’clock this morning (as you do!!!).
An hour ago I set to work once again, more determined than ever. What kind of dad would I be if I simply ‘got a man in’ because our window was broken? After a few minutes of watching me hanging out from our upstairs window a neighbor offered to give me the number of ‘a man’… ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll be fine,’ I replied and continued to twist, screw, unscrew, pull, push and bash (just a little of course!!!). And it was at about this point that a truly strange thing happened…
I FIXED IT 😀
I now need to work out how to fix our entire knackered guttering, without ‘getting a man in’. Watch this space…
