Ken & Avis Baldry's Flats Pages - Index page

Water leaks...

...are a landlords' biggest nightmare. Please contact them immediately a leak is detected or, if they are unavailable, the plumber if it seems to be a water supply leak or the gas engineer if it seems to involve the boilers.

Losing your keys...

Either, take your partner's set to Franchi Locks & Tools Ltd at 278 Holloway Road (just North of Holloway Road tube statioin & on the other side of the road) & get another set cut or throw yourself on the unsympathic mercy of the landlords, who will let you in if they are around.

Courtesy... There are other flats in all these buildings. It is mutually protective to liaise with your neighbours & maintain good relations with them, particularly keeping noise down.

Potential problems:-

These are old flats, with far more plumbing than originally anticipated. Drains. Some one has been putting fat or oil residues down their kitchen sink. Please do not do this, as it clogs up the drain in the garden area, flooding it with a nasty smell outside the basement bedroom. It took me 1.5 hours to clear the problem, as the fat sticks the filter up as well as blocking the drain. What I do at home is let solid fat residues set in a bowl & put them out with the organic waste collection & oil, we put in empty milk boxes & put out with the ordinary rubbish.

Mice. I have Rentokil's surveyor round & he found the mouse droppings I had found when I brought the mouse traps round. He was also quite blunt about the number of places for mice to hide, given the state of disorder in some of the flats. The Ratcatcher (ok, mousecatcher) will be bringing little white bait boxes round & will place them in tempting spots for the mice. This will be done four times. This does not come on the NHS, so I will dock the cost from the deposits, as, last time I cleaned a flat erlier this year (2006), there were no signs of mice.
The surveyor left some hints: don't leave food residues around, i.e. do the washing up after breakfast, which may mean setting your alarm clock a few minutes earlier; tidy up (& please do this before the Ratcatcher, Brian Wellington, a well-known Islington figure, arrives). One from me: put food in the cupboards hanging on the wall, as mice do not make great mountaineers & put your crockery in the lower cupboards, after giving them a wipe with bleach.

Rubbish:-

Put it out frequently, as food residues encourgae vermin. Dustbin days are on the flat web pages. The green boxes are Recyclers for paper, cardboard, tins & bottles, both glass & plastic. Do not put anything else in them but check this page occasionally, as the rules change. Anything else recyclable (see the Council's rubbish page on this link) can be taken to the Hornsey Road Dump by vehicle or by foot to Cottage Road (off the Caledonian Road).