Press the big green button!
Wow, so much happening at the moment I have not even thought about blogging. I don't think I'm the only one busy at the moment as most of my blogging friends have not been posting much recently either.
The work has begun on our ensuite, so our bedroom is in a bit of a mess at the moment and will probably be that way until Christmas at least (I think my Christmas holiday will be spent with Florence in one hand, mince pie in the other and paint brush in the other); so we've been choosing showers, shower units, sinks and toilets, fairly boring stuff really, but we don't want to get it wrong.
My car failed it's MOT just over a week ago, I could get the work done, but as it has done 205K miles on it and probably isn't worth it. The major thing is the ABS, which is an unknown quantity, but there's at least £400 of work on top of that, so I've decided to call it a day. So that means I'm looking for a car at the moment, I've got my sights set on an Audi A2 Tdi as their fuel economy is good and I drive ~100 miles per day. As Clare has an estate now, at weekends we travel in that as it gives more room for the kids so I only need something comfortable. At the moment I'm driving Clare's to work, which means she's bound to the house with 2 kids and I'm having enormous fun driving her 2.0L Turbo V40 - but spending a fortune on fuel!
We ran out of water!! Last week I was in the shower and it turned into a cold dribble, so I thought the shower had failed. Later we discovered we had no cold water at all hot was OK, contents of tank). We're not on mains water, we have a pump in the utility room that sucks it from the well in the garden and pumps it to a tank in the roof. We feared the worse and thought the pump had failed, so we started looking for service engineers for our make of pump - we only found 3 in the UK! After several hours of searching and testing (we had a sparky coming that day anyway) we found a switch in the utility room that must have been knocked. We felt a bit stupid, but you don't look at these things until they go wrong and at least it didn't cost a fortune as we were expecting. Moral of the story - If something stops working, before you do anything else, try pressing the big green button.
Hmm, I wonder if we should get a manual override pump, in case of a power cut.
The sparky I mentioned came to re-arrange some light switches and sockets after we divided a bedroom. He found the electrics to be in a bit of a state, he thinks the previous owner must have done the work himself as no electrician would do the things he's done. He did the bare minimum to do the job he was here for, but he'll have to come back and do a fair amount of work before he can install the shower in the ensuite.
We need to order more oil for our heating, it turns out our tank hold 500 gallons, so we can certainly order more than 1000 litres to get the discounted rate. We've also ordered some wood for the fire, I chopped up the last of our logs at the weekend. Anyone would think winter was coming!!
So these are some of the things I've been up to, I'll try and post again soon. The girls are all doing well, all of us are fighting colds, but nothing serious.
The work has begun on our ensuite, so our bedroom is in a bit of a mess at the moment and will probably be that way until Christmas at least (I think my Christmas holiday will be spent with Florence in one hand, mince pie in the other and paint brush in the other); so we've been choosing showers, shower units, sinks and toilets, fairly boring stuff really, but we don't want to get it wrong.
My car failed it's MOT just over a week ago, I could get the work done, but as it has done 205K miles on it and probably isn't worth it. The major thing is the ABS, which is an unknown quantity, but there's at least £400 of work on top of that, so I've decided to call it a day. So that means I'm looking for a car at the moment, I've got my sights set on an Audi A2 Tdi as their fuel economy is good and I drive ~100 miles per day. As Clare has an estate now, at weekends we travel in that as it gives more room for the kids so I only need something comfortable. At the moment I'm driving Clare's to work, which means she's bound to the house with 2 kids and I'm having enormous fun driving her 2.0L Turbo V40 - but spending a fortune on fuel!
We ran out of water!! Last week I was in the shower and it turned into a cold dribble, so I thought the shower had failed. Later we discovered we had no cold water at all hot was OK, contents of tank). We're not on mains water, we have a pump in the utility room that sucks it from the well in the garden and pumps it to a tank in the roof. We feared the worse and thought the pump had failed, so we started looking for service engineers for our make of pump - we only found 3 in the UK! After several hours of searching and testing (we had a sparky coming that day anyway) we found a switch in the utility room that must have been knocked. We felt a bit stupid, but you don't look at these things until they go wrong and at least it didn't cost a fortune as we were expecting. Moral of the story - If something stops working, before you do anything else, try pressing the big green button.
Hmm, I wonder if we should get a manual override pump, in case of a power cut.
The sparky I mentioned came to re-arrange some light switches and sockets after we divided a bedroom. He found the electrics to be in a bit of a state, he thinks the previous owner must have done the work himself as no electrician would do the things he's done. He did the bare minimum to do the job he was here for, but he'll have to come back and do a fair amount of work before he can install the shower in the ensuite.
We need to order more oil for our heating, it turns out our tank hold 500 gallons, so we can certainly order more than 1000 litres to get the discounted rate. We've also ordered some wood for the fire, I chopped up the last of our logs at the weekend. Anyone would think winter was coming!!
So these are some of the things I've been up to, I'll try and post again soon. The girls are all doing well, all of us are fighting colds, but nothing serious.
posted by Paul Marshall at 10:54
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