Good electrician, bad electrician

I will be glad when the rewiring is done - it's due to start on 3rd December.  Lucky Matt, it coincides with his 6 days off work.  There are some good things though.  We get to decide where we want plug sockets - there's been a huge leap in the amount of electrical equipment people have since the wiring was first put in.  And we'll have a shower put in while we're having the rewiring done - another of those things we haven't got round to yet.  This VAT reduction has come at an excellent time for us as well :)  Oh yes, and our house will no longer be a fire risk.  

We're planning on trying to get some money back from the electrician who certified the electrics and did some of the work about two years ago - yes, just before we bought the house.  I know that if we had employed him claiming would be easy enough but I'm not sure where we stand as we've bought the house from the people who bought the original service.  Her certified it as good for 5 years when it wasn't actually good for ten minutes, so I think it's worth a go.

Small hiatus

I finished my essay!  My weekend was fairly tedious (Apart from going out for Matt's birthday and going to a baby shower... so not so bad...) but I managed to find around 3000 words to say about how our relets department does continuous improvement.  We'll see.

I have more work to do - another test, another essay, an exam - but I'm in that lovely state of readjusting to not having something to do every single minute.  And I'm going on holiday!  Matt is 30 on Thursday so we're going away for a long weekend.  I'm very excited.  It's going to be fun!  And nothing at all about continuous improvement!

When even the good news isn't actually good...

We started having some problems with the electrics in our bathroom recently.  A while ago the fan stopped working and we never quite got round to getting it fixed.  And then the bathroom light started flickering randomly.  It's irritating when the light goes out when you're on the loo...

When the fan switch started sparking and making crackling noises and the light was flickering even when it was turned off at the switch, we thought we'd better do something.  We turned the light circuit off at the fuse box and lived in darkness for a week.  The electrician came out on Monday and said the wire from the light switch and the wire to the light fitting were different colours (apparently bad), the light was live all the time (also bad apparently) and the fuse for the wiring circuit should have an earth as well as a live wire coming out of it(even I know this isn't good).

They came back yesterday and did some more investigations.  Matt texted me to say there was good news and there was bad news.  At this point I was hopeful.  Maybe, I thought, this meant that not much needed doing but they couldn't do it for a couple of weeks.  No...  The bad news is that the whole house needs rewiring.  The good news is that the house hasn't burnt down.  At some point the fan set itself on fire and then smothered itself.