beauty is only skin deep

You've heard about form over fashion. Well, here, we often have fashion over form. Or as hubby puts it, our house was built for show, not for function. For example, we have marble kitchen counters. Now, marble is actually quite cheap in this part of the world - probably even cheaper than laminate. But here we sit in a house with five bathrooms, marble floors, and marble kitchen counters. Sounds impressive. Read on.

This week has been a challenge. From Tuesday on, we gradually lost cold water in the kid's bathroom. Then hot water disappeared from both the kitchen and the kid's bathroom. Now, with five bathrooms, who cares, right? Wrong. That one bathroom is the only bathroom in the house with hot water so once it went, so did our hot baths and showers. By Friday, we had no running water on the western side of our house. We were stumped. We looked at all the pipes, the valves, the water tank, but to no avail. So we contacted our landlord - a really nice guy, fortunately. At the same time, we told him about the problem in the electrical circuit in the kid's room (sense a theme here?).

Sunday evening all sorts of 'tradesmen' descended on our house. First the plumbers came, switched a few valves on and off (we still can't figure out why this certain configuration is necessary, but there you have it) and restored both hot and cold water flow to their original status. Yippee! Hot showers again. Then for the difficult question - why no hot water on the east side of the house? Answer: you need another hot water heater if you want hot water on that side. After some probing, hemming and hawing, our landlord ascertained the actual problem. The plumber (yes, this same man), never actually hooked the hot water heater up to the other bathrooms. So are the hot water taps all just for show?!

Of course, I in my western mindset would have been livid. Here I'd just paid for my house to be refurbished and they left out something as important as this! Our landlord, in typical local fashion was completely unperturbed. The plumber will come tomorrow (hopefully) and fix the problem.

The plumbers were followed by the electrician. Hubby kindly offered this gentleman a flashlight so he could see what he was doing with all the electricity off. And the offer was kindly declined. No need, he wouldn't need to turn off the electricity. Hubby's response was to swear that if any of our children ever want to be an electrician, they're doing their training in the US or Australia! My response was to remind hubby that when he moved the body, he should do it with a wooden stick and then I could administer a precordial thump followed by other resuscitative measures.

Anyway, electrical problems are fixed (and without injury). Plumbing problems - well, hopefully before the baby comes I'll have hot water in my own bathroom! Sorry no pictures of this process. Please don't be shy about coming to stay with us. We're likely to have all the kinks worked out by the time you arrive.