Hindered by Utilities
Entry posted by Dazza
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Well we are really pushing on with the house now and we appeared to be making super progress (but then the bureaucratic public services bureau got in the way!).
The Plasterer has completely finished, the Plumber has been in and finished and we have even had the finished floor level put in, so it now feels a lot more homely. We were hoping to have the heating on to dry things out properly so we can get in and start to put a white wash on the newly plastered walls, the only thing is we need Water and Electricity.
Now the Water situation is completely my fault. I have been sitting on my hands waiting for the Water Service to contact me with a 'Tap in' date so that we can dig up the road and connect to the Mains, However, it appears that it was them who were waiting for to contact them to tell them we were ready for connection 
. This was actioned on Thursday and we have been given a connection date of the 2nd October (not too long to wait).
The Electricity plonkers were out with us back in July and they asked us to dig a trench across our land, under the river which runs down the side of the property, through my Father in Laws land and up to an Electricity Pole on the land where they would connect up to the transformer. We dug the trench and the Engineers came out and ran the cable, we filled in the trench an awaited connection.
Now if I take a few steps back, I applied for the Electricity connection in May and I spoke to an Electricity boffin on the phone who asked for the land reference etc so he could do a site assessment to give us an idea of cost for supply. We chatted on the phone for a bit and I asked him when they were likely to be out to do the survey. To cut a long story short, the Electrcity boffin said 'oh we don't do those site visit surveys anymore, it's all on the computer now, we can plot it all out from here'. Now being that I live IT (Computers) I thought good on ya, that should save some time. Zoom forward to last Monday. I rang the Electricity company and my language was a bit 'electric'. I asked them where the hell the engineer had gone. He ran cables 6 weeks ago and hasn't connected up to the transformer. The Electricity boffin said 'oh yeah, sorry we haven't been in contact, there appears to be a problem'. When I asked what the problem was, he told me that there wasn't a transformer on the pole. This I actually knew, but why should I have relayed that info to him. If they couldn't get off their fat ar*es and come out and do a live site survey then thats there fault.
Anyway, he now says that they will have to put up a transformer and there is a significant cost in doing so. I asked who the hell was going to pay for that then, because we certainly weren't. He begrudgingly blamed himself for not doing the survey properly and said that they would have to stump up the cost!!!
So in conclusion we should have a Water connection on the 2nd October and Electricity which has been scheduled for the 11th October oh and we've saved somewhere in the region of 5 grand for a transformer 
.
Oh and no photo's this time as you won't really notice anything different from the outside at the moment....... (You'll be glad to know).
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