I hope you’ve not suffered too much damage from the recent storms, here Storm Eunice - with a red weather warning - was here on Friday, and she definitely left her mark. My home office is in the top of our house and I could definitely hear the wind. My working day involved several more looks out the window to see what was going on, at both the front and back of the house. MOH’s home office is on the floor below and he had a birds eye view of our neighbour’s fence, which was definitely blowing in the wind and looking more zig-zagged than straight.
Just down the road the O2 was also suffering and I’m sure you’ve seen its news that part of the roof blew off. For us, it was thankfully less dramatic, though there’s some more repair work needed so I’m hoping as I’m writing this that Storm Franklin isn’t as bad.
Next door’s zig-zag fence
It doesn’t look any better at ground level. They’re not having a good time of it at the moment as they’ve also had a bathroom leak into the basement flat.
There’s lots of twigs down in our garden, and while we haven’t checked all of the garden carefully it’s easy to see from the house that one of our sycamore has a broken branch. It’s still up there, and lodged in the other branches, and I’m hoping it manages to stay there. Ironically these trees were supposed to have been pollarded, but the tree man has done missing. We’ve three trees that need work and our neighbours have two further trees, and so it’s not a small project between us, so it’s strange for there to be lots of interest and then nothing. Neither our neighbour our MOH can make contact, so it’s probably time to start looking for someone else.
A broken branch, lodged among other branches - let’s hope it stays there!
Our roof at the front of the house wasn’t quite so fortunate. We saw on Saturday morning that the lead had lifted and two tiles had gone. We weren’t sure where, but were grateful that it wasn’t onto any of the parked cars in the drive. We hoped that they had simply dropped down into the gutter which goes around the house - and we were half right, that’s exactly where one of the tiles had gone. MOH was able to reach that earlier today by leaning out of the window.
The other tile was found by our neighbour, on the roof. And bless him, he was up on our roof on Saturday afternoon (when the weather still wasn’t that great) retrieving it for us. Before covid he added a roof terrace giving his flat some outside space - as part of that it’s relatively easy for him to get onto his roof, and therefore our roof. He’s always very generously said that if we needed to access our roof then we are welcome to do this via his roof space.
What he also did while he was retrieving the tile was push the lead back down, and so giving our roof more protection from the rain we’ve had since then, and more which is forecast too. What a superstar neighbour - we’re incredibly grateful for this interim fix.
You really can’t beat good neighbours can you?