[JayG]

For the last few years Sheffield has been blessed with the services of Amey and their contractors who have been replacing street lights, removing trees (extremely controversial) and resurfacing roads and pavements.

With immaculate timing they chose 3 days ago to close my road for pavement works - by yesterday they had removed the old tarmac and laid the rough tarmac undercoat, and last night I could see my water stopcock cover just a few centimetres clear of the surface.

Watched them apply the smooth finishing layer this morning, and sure enough - stopcock disappears under a layer of steaming tarmac. 

An interesting conversation ensued, which involved the suggestion that because Mr. Tarmac-layer hadn't seen it, ergo; stopcock was clearly a figment of my imagination.

I assured him that not only was there indeed a now buried stopcock there which I had used on several occasions in the past, but that with no internal stopcock it was the only way of turning off my mains water in the event of a leak.

Mr. Tarmac-layer still seemed unconvinced, so I offered to find a magnet to try to locate it. That didn't work, so we resumed our philosophical discussion about the ephemeral nature of stopcock existence.

Luckily, another contractor appeared who presumably had quite a lot of experience of spotting stopcocks under fresh tarmac  , and was able to free it from its tomb of still-rubbery tarmac.

Can't help fearing for probably quite a few residents of Sheffield come a severe freeze-up! 

[mumofstig]

There are some really 'experienced and knowledgeable' tradespeople around nowadays, aren't there At least you noticed before they left the scene.

I seem to be meeting the kind who seem to think it is not part of their job to remove any waste from the premises on completion of said job  Yesterday I had an 'interesting' conversation with the man who cleaned next door's chimney and thought he could dump all the debris from doing so, into my wheelie bin as next door's wasn't out yet  The cheek of it!

[hamstergbert]

Chap who cleans our chimney takes all waste away.  He has to - it is classed as industrial effluent!

[rowlandwells]

seen that on the tele about cutting down perfectly good trees in Sheffield and the protests made to try to stop this continuing and yes it was very controversial and quite rightly so was somebody short of logs for the fire?

as far as covering the stopcock what a plonker call yourself a tradesman better call trust a trader.com as the house floods there are people out there scratching there heads now where did we hide that stopcock I'm shore it was hear yesterday 

good job you've got your eye on the ball Jay 

[grinling]

I'm glad they are doing the roads in Sheffield as some are awful. Our back roads here might be bad but at least you can drive on them.

[JayG]

My pretty quiet residential street was originally scheduled to be resurfaced in June 2015, and it still hasn't happened. Many of the main roads which have been resurfaced in the past few years are already breaking up quite badly in places.

Many threads and hundreds of posts about both road and pavement works, and yes, 'the tree issue' on the Sheffield forum, although I can't really recommend it as a good Christmas read as they mostly produce much more heat than light on the issues involved. 

[8doubles]

Robinet arret is french for stopcock , you never know when this knowledge will come in handy.

Must suss it out in Polish !

[hamstergbert]

Kranik

[JayG]

My tarmac-man wasn't Polish, and probably not a Python fan either (nor me either really) but there was definitely something a bit Pythonesque about being stood outside my house, glowing in a steamy tarmaccy fragrance, having a philosophical argument with Mr. Tarmac-man about whether the fact that he had personally buried my stopcock, which was therefore no longer visible, meant that it in effect it had never existed!