Bah Humbug!

Thank you for your kind words yesterday.

I'm having a Christmas Party tomorrow but right now I don't feel all that Christmassy. This morning I did, I even hung my baubles off the sideboard (too big for our Festive Christmas Ficus). Then not long after 9am the emergency roofer arrived and the day went down hill.

In my opinion, losing our roof was an emergency, it was a huge emergency hence why we had called our insurers domestic emergency line. Today the emergency roofers showed up. I started to think something was amiss when he asked if he could see where the water was coming in "well if it rains it comes in our house *points* here, here and here, but in the loft, all over the place". Cue concerned look from the roofer. So up he goes. Few minutes later there's a knock on the door. It's too big/expensive a job to be covered by the emergency department, emergencies don't include scaffolding and rebuilding a roof.

I then spent the rest of the day back and forth on the phone. First to the insurers, they passed me on to the claims department. They decided they'd need to get a surveyor out before anything could be done so they passed our case onto the buildings claims service. A couple of hours later they call and say they'll ring us later next week to arrange an appointment. 10 minutes later it dawns on me and I'm back on the phone to the insurers. They can't do anything until a survey has been done, we can't do anything or we risk not only jepordising our own claim but everyone else in the blocks claim as well. All they could suggest was calling the surveyors back.

So I did. It took a lot of effort to get across to them the fact we're currently missing a large portion of the roof. That if it rains heavily potentially the ceilings in most of our house could fall in (there are cracks all over the place). It seems they're not used to things needing done with any urgency outside the emergency department. After emailing yesterdays photo to them the nice man spoke to his manager and arranged for a surveyor to call us. Unfortunately by then it was late on a Friday afternoon so they can't come out until Monday.

So in the meantime all we can do is wait and pray that it stays dry. We went to bed with as much as possible moved under the tiled section of the house (including our bed) and buckets lined up under as many cracks as possible. And here I am at 4am unable to sleep, my house is in chaos and I have guests arriving in just over 12 hours but at least it's dry.