Has a big old hole in the roof owing to the fire that happened on the last day of July this year. I was working in the garden at the time and heard 3 loud, reasonably spaced bangs before it happened and on the first two I had thought people were playing with fireworks(I even looked around to see no one was using fireworks) but it confused me slightly as it was Summer. It must have been due to my impaired hearing as I was using an iPod to compensate for the dullness of garden work, but I was sure someone was using bangers when I got the smell of smoke at the third bang. I was also amazed by the speed at which I perceived the clouds to be moving at judging by the shadow overhead. That's when I realised it wasn't clouds. Went inside, did the whole 'everyone out' thing, and I was out, my dad having called the fire brigade( who took 20 minutes to arrive, there's a fire station planned for my locality) and basically, the day was very boring, except of course for the neighbours, house fires are apparently a spectators' sport. I was surprised by my non-cholant attitude but I decided, hey, insurance will cover it.
It's actually been a very convenient fire, I actually see it as a blessing from God. We were planning on emptying our attic of our junk anyway, and now that's all taken care of, and we get money for junk we lost but wouldn't have used anyway. All the junk filling the house is gone and all the consoles and computers survived, so that's good. We're renting a bigger house now(rent covered by insurance) and the side wall of my house was structurally damaged such that it may be financially as well to expand over the garage(which is beside the side wall) so I may be returning to a bigger house as well! You see, we were planning on converting the attic and perhaps doing the expansion over the garage, but now both are more likely, financially easier, and my procrastiinating dad is forced into action! Hoorah!
The only downside is we have to make loss lists to make our full contents claim of E60,000, which is essentially invent-a-belonging. This I would normally consider dishonest, but in this case I know my house contents were worth E60,000 but we don't know all the junk we had in our house. How could they expect us to?
Oh, and my Leaving Cert results are out the day after tomorrow, or so they say.