The Week That Was...

a nightmare...

It started on the 8th.. We had just returned from having afternoon tea.. a prebirthday treat. ( actually a leftover gift voucher that I had lost then re found, only for it to be out of date. However the wonderful people at Betty's tearooms still let me use it) 

So that was all very lovely. I got home and popped into my art room to print off a photo for a project. the piece of card I picked up was wet.. I thought perhaps I had spilled water on it somehow.. then the next piece was wet, then something splashed near me and I looked up. 

Water was dripping down from my ceiling. All hell broke loose as we flew up into the attic, to find the boiler had broken and leaked all over. 

I had been in the attic 3 days before this.. so we knew it had possibly been leaking for up to 3 days. 

Water was turned off, boiler turned off.. no heating and no hot water at the coldest time of the year.. Marvellous!

For almost a week we had no heating or hot water, and I spent 2 days clearing out stuff from the attic Not too many 'precious' items were effected, but a few of sentimental value.Lots of paper based items, boxes, files, college notes, magazines etc and a couple of framed prints.. all very wet indeed. 

These are the back of 2 framed prints, they are A1 size and you can see they were stood in a few inches of water. 

After a few days the boards started to dry out. Enough for us to get a plumber to look at the situation and give us a quote. 

The ceiling in my art room is effected quite a lot. 

With the amount of water that had leaked we just knew under the attic boards was going to be worse than what we could see on the surface. So we had to start lifting those and pull out all the soaking insulation. 

This area is absolutely soaked through. The hope is that it will dry out and not go mouldy. We are watching it each day. If it does not dry out enough or starts to give way then my art room will need a new ceiling. 

All this happened over his birthday and mine, 9th and 10th. We had a night out planned which we had to cancel. 

Then there were lots more cuts announced where he works, all very scary indeed. 

The house has been so cold  have spent whatever time I could under a blanket with multiple layers of socks and gloves on. Arthritis in my finger has been playing up. 

A full, and I do mean FULL car load has gone to landfill. Another FULL carload has gone to charity. 

There is at least ( if not more) another carload to come out of the attic. 

We finally got hot water and heating back on Saturday morning, then i had to catch up on washing all the wet towels that we had mopped up with. I also had a last minute experimental blog project to make. 

As I had been really ill at Christmas, we had missed out on a family get together, well we missed out on Christmas all together lol and now we had missed out on our birthdays too...

Sunday just gone, we arranged to go to my parents to celebrate xmas, birthdays and valentines. 

So of course Ibaked a cake. I shouldn't have really it just wasn't the week for it. Everything that could go wrong last week, did. 

But despite it fighting me every step of the way i was determined to have a cake lol

I dipped strawberries in chocolate, the first lot of chocolate would not melt enough. 

The 2 sponges took ages and did not rise like I wanted them too. I do believe our oven is at the end of its days. 

The plain one is vanilla with a cream and lemon curd filling. 

The choc one is beetroot and chocolate with  a cream and fresh raspberries filling. 

The chocolate ganache failed, actually failed twice. Plan B involved a lemon butter icing on the bottom square cake and then a late night dash to Tesco to find ready roll icing for the top cake. 

I had no brown food colouring. Tesco had no brown food colouring. 

Had to mix green and red, all that was available was the liquid stuff that only stains your hands and doesn't actually colour food at all. The ready roll icing looked more grey than anything. At this point I  was stomping around, so very annoyed. 

So I went for a shower. Dyed my hair. Forgot to put gloves on, dyed my hands. Thank goodness for a Ranger scrubbie. 

Found a new paintbrush still in its packet. 

Made more of the red/green mix and painted it on.  

So this is what we ended up with. it is my version of one I had seen on pinterest, no where near as good as that one, but not bad considering the week I had just had. 

I really wanted to add Thorntons choc hearts with everyone's initials iced on them, but witht he attic fiasco i just didn't have time to go into town for the hearts. luckily Asda had some Guylian hearts.(4 for £1)

Now to pop it into a box to transport it... yeah didn't think this one through. None of my cake boxes were big enough. I had to empty a 12 x 12 RUB of all its scrapbook paper and put the cake in that. 

This was on my knee the whole journey, wafting chocolatey strawberries up at me. I was so hungry I am amazed it made it there in one piece. Well one grape did fall off and rolled around the box at every corner. 

As we stepped out of the door to go to my parents the heavens opened and we had a hailstorm. I cannot imagine whet I looked like carrying the cake under an umbrella to reach the car. 

The traffic was sooo slow, the hail turned into a snowstorm and we arrived an hour late. 

But we had sparklers. 

4 of  us had birthdays this week, this is my sister in law Jacki, it was her birthday on the day we were together, so she got to cut the cake. 

with a willing helper.. 

On the way home we hit more snow which turned to ice and we skidded around every bend, corner and roundabaout. I was so, so glad to get out of the car and into the house. 

I finished the day under a blankie, with a hot cuppa in one of these new cups. This was my xmas gift from my Mum, that has been waiting for me to go pick up all this time. not only are the cups lovely the tin will make a great cake tin. 

So onto a new week,it started pretty well with a meal out with friends and this Belgian waffle. 

Fingers crossed nothing else goes wrong. Please send good drying vibes to my ceiling lol 

Darcy x