KEY POINTS:
In the early morning a few days ago, my husband heard the faintly hollow miaow that our cat makes when it has caught something. It was a small, struggling mouse, which bit him as he tried to persuade the cat to let it go.
Later that morning he
went to our doctor to get a tetanus shot and a course of penicillin. My husband stood biting his lip and sweating as he paid for the treatment and then he went off to work as usual.
There are three key things here. The first is that a man with a hard day's work behind him is awake enough to hear a faint miaow at 2am.
The second is that the doctor has been treating my husband for depression for three years. The third is that the sweating and lip-biting was not because of the medical treatment, it was because he was hoping and praying there was enough left in the bank account to pay for it.
These are the three markers of a leaky home owner - inability to sleep, depression and financial terror.
We are entering our seventh year of the waking hell that is leaky home ownership. And the first question people ask on the rare occasion when we can bring ourselves to talk about it is, "How on earth can it take so long to resolve?"
We spent the first year and a half trying to persuade the previous owners and developers to help correct the defects.
Letters from their lawyers all said the same thing: go away, stop bothering us, or get a lawyer.
We went to Weathertightness service (WHRS), which found us eligible and tried to further the case for another year.
It's a very simple script: We pay $200. Weathertightness tries to persuade the council and the previous owners to come to mediation. Council agrees. Previous owners don't.
Next option? Pay another $200 and Weathertightness will order an adjudication, at which all parties must be present.
A cheap option? It is, except that the council will trot out its high-powered lawyers and eviscerate us where we stand unless we also trot out a high-powered lawyer.
We spent the next six months trying to persuade the council to do the right thing. They offered us 25 per cent of what we needed to fix the house.
Ever more desperate, we considered appealing to the media.
At this point a kindly law firm found a few legal points that might be more use than the moral ones we had been using.
They spent the next year persuading the previous owners to do the right thing and mediate. When that failed, they finally used the legal crowbar and managed to get as far as a pre-mediation.
Then the previous owners threw up their hands and claimed that they couldn't afford a lawyer any more. Their lawyer requested an infinite postponement on the basis that the previous owner was suffering from ill-health. WHRS had no teeth to deal with this.
Yet my family, the actual injured party here, was entering into its fifth year of ill-health and danger, with no relief in sight.
Finally, the new Weathertightness Tribunal, with its tighter deadlines, seemed to offer some hope, and our case was moved to their jurisdiction.
New Year, new start: and my husband and I attended the first conference with our lawyers.
The first milestone is called Disclosure. I went there to find out if there was anything to show the previous owners had no knowledge of the dangers of the house. There wasn't.
The next milestone is a deadline for anyone involved in the case who believes they shouldn't be, to apply to be removed. No one did.
The next milestone any day now is a deadline for anyone involved in the case to apply for someone else who might be involved, to have to join in.
We don't know how much to hope for if the tribunal orders a mediation at last.
So this morning it was my turn to hear the faint hollow miaow of our cat and its prey.
But I was angry, and so I went downstairs with a jug of cold water. I gave the cat one warning, and when it ignored me, I dumped cold water over its head.
I think it is time somebody threw a jug of cold water over the councils who sign off faulty buildings and the developers who knowingly sell them.
