THE HOUSE IS FALLING DOWN - EVACUATE THE DOGS

Ok, now that I've got your attention I'll go onto the mundane truth of it.

We got an ominous call from the builder last night. He was a little worried about some diagonal cracks in the bedroom wall. He wondered if we wanted to call the surveyor in... oh dear.

Now that he's stripped off some plaster and some more render the problem seems to be a lack of lintels. Or lintels put in by people who didn't know much about building houses. Or basic physics.

The lintels for pretty much every window in the old house are knackered. Not only that, they're only a few millimeters wider than the windows themselves. Oh, and around one of them the wall has turned into crumbly rubble. This means that we've got some walls resting pretty much on window frames and some others resting on... well... nothing. The ones resting on nothing are unfortunately the ones holding up the floor upstairs.

So that's a shame.

Builder reckons he can fix it all. But its not exactly good news.

The weathers been nasty today, so that's made the dogs very restless. We've decided to take the plunge and book them into the kennels. This is not just to keep our neighbours happy, because the ones whose opinions we value have actually been very kind. Its really for their sake. Its not fair for them to be in such a disruptive environment. So they're off on another holiday on Sunday.

Hopefully this should make both their and our lives easier. We can go ahead with what work we can while the dogs can have a restful experience in their little holiday home.

This is all turning a little negative, but I really don't want it to sound that way. I think it's just the influence of John Humphreys on Art School. He's so stuffy and stiff. I want to stab him. Or maybe its just that w2b's blog is getting more attention than mine... boo... hiss.