It's become tradition for us to dedicate the first few days back in Cairo to DIY. Sometimes this is out of choice, sometimes necessity. This year it was both.
We got back to the apartment at the not-too-terrible time of 10.15pm and, after sorting Leila's room while she thankfully stayed asleep in the car seat, we put her to bed. Feeling that strange buzz you get after a flight, we then spent an hour or so unpacking our suitcases and generally 'sorting' things. Sometime just before midnight we decided enough was enough and started to get ready for bed, but Alice was struggling to flick the mains electricity switch for the air conditioner in our bedroom.
"Just give it some force and flick it," I said, rather unhelpfully. But it wouldn't budge.
So then I had a go. It wouldn't budge. I tried more force. It still wouldn't budge.
As is becoming tradition with this apartment, I took the faceplate off the switch to see what the problem was. There was nothing obvious at first glance, and I didn't want to go prodding around inside while it was still live. In a
previous post we boasted about how we had labelled the different areas of the apartment on the main fuse box when we first moved in, and that this made it much easier for us when looking at the mains electrics. That's all well and good, but it turns out we hadn't located the switch for the air conditioner in our room. There were, however, a number of switches that didn't seem to do anything and, after going through them again in the early hours of Monday morning, it turned out that one of them was the master bedroom AC.
Having isolated the power, and by now feeling very frustrated and tired, I figured that if the switch in the room wasn't flicking properly then it would need replacing anyway. I therefore set about whacking it with a hammer. It finally moved to the 'on' position. However, putting the power on and turning the air conditioner on with the remote control only resulted in a small flame burning inside the switch. I turned it off again.
We therefore decamped to the spare room where we spent three hours failing to get to sleep. Eventually we went back into our room without the air conditioner and managed to get a couple of hours' sleep before Leila got up.
The next morning, after breakfast and some playtime, I disassembled the air con switch and headed up to Road 233. The guy in the electrics store had exactly the right replacement and so a couple of minutes later I was back home. Leila was napping by this point and so Alice gave me a hand as we fitted the new switch. Bingo. We now have air con back in our room and, as I'm writing this the next day, I can assure you it resulted in a very good night's sleep.
The other DIY we've had on our mind related to baby-proofing the apartment. Before leaving in July we had bought and set up a play fence to cordon off a large area part of the living room that we would keep 'Leila friendly'. However, over the summer she's become very good and keen at walking and generally moving about, so we want to open up a bit more of the apartment to her. Unfortunately, though, she insists on walking into the kitchen which is the once room we'd prefer to keep her out of since it's quite small and frankly not the safest room in the house.
We'd looked into buying safety gates in the various shops around Cairo, and they're very difficult to come by. When somebody does sell them they cost a fortune. We considered bringing some out with us from the UK, but they're heavy and bulky and we were already bringing 4 suitcases and the buggy. I've also had a cursory look at building them. There's a few carpenters around who would be able to do it, but based on the price of custom wood things we've bought already I estimate somewhere around 400LE per gate. That's pretty cheap for something custom built, but considering we bought the plastic fence panels for just over 500LE for four, the fence panels are much more economical and just as safe (if not safer).
The question was therefore how to fix them to the places we need gates. The fence panels are designed to fit together in a square and so you need a bit of a bodge-it mentality to do anything other than that. In the living room we've used an intricate arrangement of industrial strength cable-ties to secure the fence panels to a heavy table at one end and a large chair at the other. But to go across doorways we needed something else.
Yesterday we found that the end for the 'peg' on the fence will fit into a large steel hook/eyelet screwed into the wall, and Alice had the brilliant idea of using the same type of screw-in hook at the other end (where there is a hole in the fence to receive the peg) and feeding a broom handle through the holes to secure the other end.
So this morning daddy and daughter had an adventure to the 'other end' of Road 233, where the shops get more local and where there's a hardware store. The shopkeeper didn't have any closed-loop screw-in things but did have screw-in hooks, a large set of pliers, and incredibly strong forearms with which he closed the loop for me. 5LE for 6 didn't strike me as a bad deal at all. I also bought a tube of silicone bathroom sealant, which I'm going to try putting on the base of some of Leila's plastic bowls to make them non-slip.
When we got home Leila was ready for bed, so while Alice took her for her nap I set about using the new screw hooks to fix a fence panel in front of the kitchen door. Fortunately the door frame for the guest toilet is close enough to allow me to screw both sets into wood, rather than needing to drill into the concrete walls. On the left in the photo below you can see the pegs moulded into the gate fitting into the screw-in loop. On the right there's a white plastic broom handle going through the holes in the fence and then through the other set of screw-in loops to secure it.
The gate was put to the test as soon as Leila woke up, and I'm delighted to report that it works perfectly! Now to work out where else we need gates, and get them fitted!
