Why I had to Move House

I recently moved house. I hate moving at the best of times, and I certainly hadn’t planned to do it again after only a year in a flat I really liked, in a delightful position near the beach and next to a wood.

The whole sorry saga began last winter. My next-door neighbour, a dour gnome of a woman, decided she needed a heat pump to keep her flat warm. Fair enough, you might say, especially as she’d previously suffered a stroke, and was most likely on blood-thinning medication. The local council, which owns the flats, apparently thought so, as they gave her permission to install a pump. What they didn’t think to do was to tell her to make sure it was a quiet one.

So, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, while I was having a quiet read in bed in preparation for sleep, a loud humming noise from outside assailed my ears. At first, I thought a car had started up somewhere near, but the noise kept on for long enough to discount this possibility. Then it stopped. With a sigh of gratitude, I settled down to sleep. Just as I was becoming pleasantly drowsy, the damned noise started up again. For some time I lay listening to what sounded like a refrigerator starting and stopping, only considerably louder. Finally, I could stand it no longer.

I dragged on my dressing gown and stumbled outside – never much fun in the middle of a winter’s night – to be confronted by the all-too-solid presence of the outside unit of the new heat pump, which my neighbour had placed practically outside my bedroom window. Never one to welcome confrontation, I dithered for some time before finally summoning the determination (or desperation) I needed. I went and knocked on the door.

And waited. And knocked again. And waited some more.

Finally, a light went on in the bedroom, and eventually my neighbour could be heard making her way to the door. The door opened and the gnome peered out, accompanied by a blast of hot air from the overheated lounge. Apologising for waking her, I entreated her to turn off the heat pump as the noise was keeping me awake.

‘But I need to keep warm,’ she said, heedless of the fact that the interior of her flat currently bore more than a passing resemblance to a fan oven.

I politely pointed out that she scarcely needed to heat the lounge while she was in bed in the bedroom. It took some time, but eventually she agreed, albeit grudgingly, to turn the thing off at night, though not without reminding me – a trifle smugly, I thought - that she got up much earlier than me, and would be turning the heat pump on again around six o’clock in the morning.

As the day wore on, I discovered the damned thing was not only loud enough to disturb my sleep, but also to make itself heard above my television or radio.

My next step was to telephone the Housing Officer at the City Council whose job it was to look after the flats and their tenants. She sounded sympathetic, and said she would check the situation out. This phone call was but the first of many, all equally fruitless. After several weeks of increasingly agitated endurance, I finally wrung out of her a promise to come and hear for herself the following day. Having realised by now the pointlessness of waiting for her to get back to me, I phoned her yet again some days later.

‘Actually,' she said, 'I didn’t think it was that loud.’

I pointed out to her that, since she didn’t have the misfortune to live next to it, she was possibly not the best person to make such a judgment. However, it seemed clear enough she had little intention of doing anything to help me.

After yet another interval of attempted stoicism, I decided to try moving further up the City Council hierarchy. I wrote to the Housing Manager describing my problem, and emphasising that there were, at that time, two empty flats in the housing complex, and asking if I could please move to one of them. I then settled down and waited for a reply. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. I never did hear back from him.

An approach to my local Member of Parliament’s office was similarly without result.

By now I was in a state of considerable stress, not just from the noise of the heat pump, but also from the realisation that those whose job it was to look after us tenants had no intention of doing so. I decided to give up, on the principle that at least I'd be avoiding the stress of trying to deal with the City Council and its dilatory minions. For a while, this seemed to be working – more or less. Eventually, however, the noise intrusion once more became too much for me, so I decided on another onslaught on the Powers that Be.

After several weeks of repeated phone calls to the Housing Officer, it became clear that not only had she no intention of addressing the situation, but she seemed to be actively avoiding me. My suspicion appeared to be confirmed by the fact that, when I finally got through to her, she immediately hastened to assure me that she hadn’t been ignoring me.

Not long after that, I read in a circular distributed by City Housing of her imminent retirement, which perhaps went some way toward explaining her lack of interest in my case. Yet again, I was forced to retreat. However, on arriving home one day I found a note in my letterbox from the new Housing Officer introducing herself and giving – be still, my beating heart! – her direct-line telephone number! Needless to say, I lost little time in phoning her. Of course I more or less had to go back to square one, but I hoped for a little more efficiency from the new broom.

It didn't take long for my hopes to be dashed. You’ll have guessed by now that I have more than my fair share of stubbornness, but this comes at a price, and by now I was thoroughly stressed out on two fronts: the heat pump and the lack of action by City Housing. And to add insult to injury, I discovered that one of the new tenants who moved into the empty flats was completely deaf, and therefore wouldn’t have been bothered by any heat-pump noise. So why on earth didn’t they let me move into his flat and put him in mine? Presumably a solution that sensible is beyond your average council employee. Finally, out of sheer desperation, I sent an email to the Mayor, attaching a copy of the fruitless letter I had sent to the housing Manager. This was on a Friday afternoon.

On Monday, I arrived home from work to find a telephone message from the Housing Officer asking me to phone her. The next morning I did so, and lo and behold, a unit had just become available in another housing complex a couple of streets away from mine. Fancy that! Obviously it pays to go to the top. When I went to see the flat, it was disappointingly dingy and scruffy looking, having been lived in for quite some time by an elderly lady, apparently without any kind of refurbishment during that time. However, I decided I’d better take it, since goodness knew how long it would be before something else became available. Besides, the Council always seemed to carry out some degree of refurbishment between tenancies, so at the very least I could expect it to be cleaned. In the event, it was completely repainted and new carpet and floor vinyl laid.

The actual process of moving was almost low-key compared with the previous six months or so, although I had to hire a removal firm, which cost considerably more than I’d expected, due to poor access on both sites. However, I had help from several very kind friends, for which I was exceedingly grateful.

I’ve now been in my new flat for two weeks and, on the whole, I like it very much. The kitchen is tiny and has almost no storage, and I’m still looking for someone to help me put up some shelves so I can unpack the rest of my foodstuffs. The bathroom is a bit cramped, due to housing the laundry as well as the usual shower, basin and toilet – and, temporarily, my cat’s litter box. He has twice gone back to my old flat, so I have to keep him inside for a couple of weeks. He hates this with a passion, and spends much of his time wandering from window to door wailing piteously and launching determined assaults on the locked cat door. It’s a lot like listening to a whining child.

I had to hire an electrician to hardwire the washing machine cord into the plug, as it seems it’s now illegal to use a normal plug in a bathroom. And I’m still waiting for a council handyman to come and make the wardrobe usable. Someone – probably a man – has altered it so that there is approximately 20 inches of rack on which to hang clothes, the rest consisting of a number of shelves and what I can only describe as shelflets, completely useless for stowing anything larger than socks. I currently have piles of clothing on the bedroom floor and the dining table and boxes of foodstuffs that I can’t put away, and I’ve had to buy a new iron because I couldn’t find the old one and was running out of neat work clothes.

Oh, and I managed to turn on the wrong stove element, burning through the cord of the toaster, which was sitting on the element at the time as I had nowhere better to put it. The toaster was plugged into the plug point on the stove at the time, so the stove wiring burnt out, too, all just as I was starting to cook my dinner on Saturday night. Until someone came to fix the stove, I was reduced to boiling water for tea or coffee in a saucepan on a gas camping stove.

On the plus side, however, the living room has more room than in the previous flat, and the flat itself is very private – almost like a miniature town house with its own little garden. And I’m close to the beach, so the air is lovely and clean And - best of all - no heat pump!

PS. I wrote this about three years ago. I'm still in the new flat, and I love it! My neighbours are friendly without being intrusive, and, with the help of my gardening lady, byt tiny garden is now a haven of green. Sadly, my cat never acclimatised to his new home, and was eventually taken in by the SPCA and put down. However, I now have a beatiful tabby cat called Merlin, who loves to cuddle up beside me on the couch and have his tummy tickled. And I've heard through the grapevine that my erstwhile neighbour moved into a home, and the tenants all had a party to celebrate!