We rent out our nice little house in Belfast while we are living here in France; I love that house too. It is just outside the city and near the water and has a lovely green grassy field beside it. If you look out of the upstairs front bedroom you can look out across the bay to Cave Hill in the distance. I miss it there too because the people of Belfast, well, Northern Ireland actually, are a breed on their own. Kind and olde worlde in a way you rarely find these days.

Just before we left to come here I noticed  some water leaking through the ceiling in the living room – never a good thing as the bathrooms in most of the houses there are usually upstairs and do not have drain holes in the floors. I never understood that. So if the bath overflows the water has nowhere to go through the floor. Which is what happened here. Cutting a long story short the other half began wailing about the cost of repairs never realising that we could get the whole thing fixed using the home insurance. He did not believe me. So I made the usual phone calls and within 2 weeks we had an entire new bathroom fitted, which was nice. We had already made the arrangements for the tenants to move in after we had left so we were now able to offer them a lovely shiny new bathroom.

The house was only 4 years old to start with; the guy we bought it from was an airline pilot and had a thing for the colour blue. I suppose you could say he felt at home being surrounded by so many shades of it. Another bonus was that because the water had also dripped down the wall of the living room we got to have that painted as well, so I chose a nice new colour in a terracotta shade. Really made a difference too – it was a nice change to feeling like we were living in an aquarium!

Oh by the way…the tenants loved the new colour scheme too   So much so I am beginning to wonder if we will ever get our house back!