Hoping I might actually get to look at the cars this week! Have had most of my free time this week eaten up fixing things that were broken in the storms last weekend.
While we got off more lightly than a lot of folks we did have some damage to deal with.
One partly detached fence panel on this side.
Which was later detached and wedged under a couple of paving slabs to prevent it inserting itself in next door's conservatory. The whole bottom edge of this was rotten anyway so my intention was to just replace it... annoyingly the neighbours across there crudely nailed it back together before I could do that so it now looks awful and will probably blow down again the moment we get more strong winds.
This just looks awful. Those tree stumps will be coming down this Spring anyway.
One other rotten half height one blown out of the frame...I'd already bodged this one back together half a dozen times so didn't see it as any great loss.
One panel completely flattened out back.
This and both panels immediately adjacent were pretty much rotten beyond redemption anyway so no huge loss...especially as they're cheap anyway.
We also had evidence of some new water ingress in the house.
Never what you want to see... especially when the location is "somewhat awkward" to get to.
This only appeared on the worst night of things when we had torrential rain that was visibly running up that skylight rather than down... I've not seen any further evidence, so filing that under "monitor carefully" for the time being.
Same night saw rain getting blown in over the top of the garage door...straight onto the electrical consumer unit, tripping the RCD several times.
The wind had also managed to get under the flashing above the front door and lift it off the box section there.
The rot in the ends of the beams there is something we're hoping to address this year. It's limited to the last few inches which aren't involved in holding the weight of the roof, that's handled by a cradle above the inner vestibule door. Also obvious there is that the drain gulley is full of plant life...again. It was last cleared out just before Halloween. I suspect that the primary reason for the rotten wood there is the previous owners never clearing out that gulley so it always overflowed.
Fence in the side garden was half "repaired" by the adjacent neighbours...which is annoying as I'd really rather have just fitted a new panel. Sadly as they don't seem to speak a word of English it's a bit tricky to try to discuss the matter with them.
New one fitted to the other side of the side garden.
I trimmed the (Council's) trees back as well so they're not battering the new fence to bits while I was there. Yes, the former owner of this place even painted the brick wall black.
In the back garden the panel which had been blown out and it's neighbours were swapped out easily enough.
This was made slightly more of a faff by the fact that while the two nearer to us are standard 6' square panels. The further one though is slightly over five feet wide...so I had to chop it down to size and rebuild the frame. By some miracle I got it millimetre perfect. The fence along the back is now a lot more rigid as it's properly anchored to the new panel I just fitted.
Final task was to sort out the conservatory roof drain yet again.
Before:
You see those flecks of that lovely vivid orange? That's the colour the conservatory and window frames all were before they got slathered in black paint. Likewise the panelling above the conservatory roof, that's marine teak...why on earth would you paint that black?!?
After:
Will stay that way for about five minutes...
Hope that this week I won't need to keep running around in circles putting fences back together, drying the consumer unit with a hair drier at 3am, or strapping stuff down in a panic when it's trying not to take off to Norway. Then I'll be able to get back to sorting out things on the automotive to do list!
Done – now posted on Useful Links.