So last night I was called upstairs to the kitchen to defrost the freezer because it had iced up to the point that the fan was making a growling noise (there goes my evening tinkering in the workshop).

Armed with my trusty heat gun, and a trigger bottle full of boiling water I set to. Last time I had to do this job I ended up with a big puddle on the polished wood floor, so this time I put the end of an old towel in the drip tray, and spread the rest on the floor first.

Halfway through, I had a wet foot - water had come through from behind the freezer and flowed out to the front. Not a lot, but enough that I noticed. So I mopped it up and carried on.

Eventually I got all the ice out from behind the evaporator, and around all the baffles and sharp pieces of stainless that wanted to cut me. My mopping up towel wasn't really all that wet compared to last time - most of the ice had come out in big chunks. I went back to wiring lights in the basement.

Five minutes into fiddling around trying to get two 1mm wires into a 2.5mm hole in a light fitting that I couldn't see (fun times!), I noticed a familar smell - it took me a little bit to register that it was cedar. Usually it's pine, or suspension grease, or concrete dust, or the nappy bucket or something..

Smelling cedar was a bit odd seeing as my kayak is still lanquishing half done on it's strongback hanging from the rafters above my car, and I haven't cut any cedar for quite a while. Actually, the smell made me feel a bit guilty that I haven't spent any time on it since before my youngest daughter was born. Still, the kayak is the only place there's any exposed cedar in my basement so I had to check it out just in case it had become a luxury rodent nest or something.

I climbed up to have a look - No, no rodents, but a nice big wet patch in the inside of the hull. Looks like all those chunks of ice were only half the story, and all that water that I was pleased to have avoided making a puddle with had actually found its way down between the floorboards, run down the rafters and dripped right in the middle of the kayak.

Guess I need to either get on with it, or at least throw a plastic sheet over the top!