You may just possibly note a more than passing obsession with water and roofs. Well my fervent desire is that such issues are all well behind us now. The sterling chaps from Capital Windows in New Milton fetched up with (almost) all the required bits and pieces and soon dismantled our leaking and unfit for purpose sunroom roof and replaced it with something more than a little reminiscent of Kew Gardens. It has a ridge with pointy things on an everything. Since then, try as it might, the weather has not managed to breach its polycarbonate and aluminium defences. Hurrah! The bits that were required yet absent? Well the CW conservatories have everything boxed in one way or another but if you have a 35 degree pitch to the roof and the manufacturer sends a 30 degree maximum widget to cover the aluminium structure, you have to get them to send the right one. No fuss, no drama, Capital Windows got it sorted. You may gather we are happy with their work, and you wouldn’t be wrong.

Slight downside is that we only got about a month out of it before it got too cold to use as a breakfast room. It soaks the sun up beautifully in the morning, but regretfully there has not been an enormous amount of that around more recently. We are therefore faced with several alternatives given the current economic and eco-climate. Firstly we can just put more layers on and pretend it’s not November in Britain, but that requires a deeper reserve of denial than we can probably plumb. Secondly increase our contribution to that little bit of global warming that is Lymington, ignore financial constraints and run a heater sufficiently powerful enough to hold the cold at bay. Or not use it until it gets a tad warmer. Although the pull of the second option is strong, if I were a betting man, the last option would be what I put my money on.

That would also mean that we don’t get to see the hedgehog eat whatever it is he is finding on the lawn just before we retire for the night. It had become our refuge from the day and a perfect place to wind down before going to bed, and the hedgehog bumbling around outside the back of the sunroom was just an added bonus. I imagine that he, well they actually as there are two of them, will be seeking somewhere warm to see out the rest of the winter oblivious of the world around them. Ever get the feeling we have missed a trick as a species?

I once heard someone say that there are two certain things in life, death and taxis. Personally I’ve never found it that easy to get a cab when I needed one but what the hey. I have to assume they meant death and taxes which makes much more sense, so may I be so bold as to add a third? Death, taxes and water in the sunroom.

Following another summer which makes you wonder where exactly the globe is getting warmed because it’s definitely not here, we were sitting in the sunroom with friends enjoying the sun actually coming out and warming us when a half cupful of water dropped onto the lunch table. Well I say table, actually it scored a direct hit on the fruit salad bowl.

After the builder guy washed his hands of the leak (an appropriate if barely amusing phraseology),

Any guesses as to what the tiler said as he left yesterday afternoon? Yup, don’t walk on the tiles. So naturally I did. But I had a good excuse M’Lud. See part of the roof in the room-with-no- name is made up of this plastic stuff which they make conservatory roofs from. Mostly see-through but prone to warming up and cooling down, and flexing in the process. When you use silicone gunk to seal the edge as per previous builder when he installed it, it eventually works loose. Simple equation, loose roof + torrential rain = wet floor. So my extenuating circumstances were that I didn’t figure a newly tiled, ungrouted floor should get wet so I crossed over to the other side and retrieved a bucket from the garage to be strategically placed.

Now as anyone who has had tiling done knows, there is a thin film of dust left where the tile has been wiped to remove excess cement and treading on this leaves footprints. So when tiler appears today to finish off cementing tiles he knows. I suppose I could have wiped the floor to remove evidence, but that would kinda give the game away. Having done some tiling in a previous life as a general maintenance guy, I knew that there was no real danger since the cement would have dried by this morning and I only stepped in the middle, but still got a mild rebuke. Not sure what he will say tomorrow when he sees the wife’s footprints added from when she went out to refill the bird feeders, maybe I’ll arrange to be busy when he arrives. Having cast and tiled a concrete step outside the backdoor, I get brownie points from the tiler as it is apparently a good job, so I may invoke the fellowship of the tile if things turn nasty. Incidentally, if you haven’t created anything from concrete and want to, you can find out all you need to know and soooo much more from Google. I look on it as a mark of how far our civilisation has progressed.

So by Friday we should have a tiled and grouted room-with-no-name and my considerable experience with a paintbrush will be called upon. We have decided it will be minimalist. Actually we decided to do it all in white since we couldn’t come up with a better idea, but that’s the same as being minimalist anyway.