any old iron...

This weekend I was supposed to be fitting new gutters at the back of the house - it's pretty much the last of the really important jobs that were left undone by the previous owner: the building's original rusty old iron guttering was left on the back wall. Between the decades of rust and the damage and disruption from all the work that was done converting the place from its former life as a shop, essentially what I had were three large metal rain collectors which each deposited water into the yard in Niagra-esque torrents whenever it rained.

Having finally laid hands on a lader recently, and being in what my mother calls a "pulling up trees" mood, I climbed up onto the garden wall on Thursday evening and pulled the first of these hated things down, on Friday I came home via Wickes with a car full of timber and plastic guttering, and the other two old gutters came down on Saturday morning with a little help from my housemate. Once the scrap metal was all neatly piled in a corner all that was left up there were some equally rusty support brackets, two of which came off in my hand but the remaining six weren't budging so after puzzling on these obstructions for a while, I went out on Sunday and bought a reconditioned angle grinder for twenty quid...

Angle grinders are fun: it is a little scary being perched atop a ladder whith this thing in my hands making that squealling wrenching metalwork sound... you know the one - it sounds as if I've opened a small factory up at my roofline, and apparently it sounds even worse inside the house - but it's really fun seeing this spinning disc chew through these manky old bits of irnomongery until there's only a little bit left and I can just twist 'em off the wall and clang them down into the yard below (being careful not to hit whoever's holding the ladder at the time of course)

Between the delay caused by the brackets and an unexpected visit from my friend Lora who's on her way to live in Paris for six months (it's a hard life being a language student!) I didn't get anywhere near as far as I wanted to with it this weekend but so long as it doesn't rain too hard (stop laughing: I know this is Scotland but it's been pretty dry recently) the house should be fine until I can get back to it later this week... if I get a good evening after work I should get it done then, but just the knowledge that I will never again be kept awake by the sound of large quantities of water hitting concrete right outside my bedroom window is definately something to smile about on this gloomy Monday morning.