Thursday 24 February 2011

Eco Friendly Heat

Well we have the wood burner in situ after much buggering about by Messrs Bodgit & Scarper the builders...(Styled after the best Laurel and Hardy silent film stars all they needed was a piano and not a cast iron wood burner) quite obviously Mr Bodgit had a spirit level but had an epic fail in it's proper use because our flue is off at a jaunty angle there must be at least 2 or 3 inches difference off the level....or the wall is wonky but thankfully you only notice it if you stand side on to the fire...other than that it's fine..

Anyway we fired up the wood burner and the stove paint started to cure giving off a blue hazy smoke which I knew would happen but of course set off our "array" of smoke alarms, and of course being the Brabrook household nothing is ever simple....

Most normal smoke alarms have batteries as ours do but the problem was all the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are wired together into the mains and if one goes off they all go off as we found out when we removed the batteries after numerous resets failed to silence them and they still continued to pump out their shrill ear bleeding noise.... one is bad enough but when you have four of them pulsing away the noise is beyond deafening... to not be woken up by them would mean you were probably already dead... which is comforting to know that we won't burn to death or succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning but it will be a very rude awakening to say the least, which is no bad thing I guess....

Anyway the only way to reset these smoke alarms is to ventilate the house and keep resetting them until they fell silent.... so we opened as many doors and windows as we could and shared our smoke alarms with the quiet neighbourhood until they ceased...which took quite some time....

I've reduced our storage heaters to one on low and completely disabled the sullen one's because even after trying to drill it into her brain explain how storage heaters work (I could tell by the blank expression that it wasn't registering) she still thinks of it as if it's an "instant on" source of heat and fails to understand that she can't turn it off during the day/evening after it's been charged up the night previously.... so I've simply disconnected it considering she had to have her bedroom window open the other night to release the stifling heat it produces... which of course is a complete waste of money flying out of her window.....besides the house is plenty warm enough with just one storage heater because of its open plan style and if we get a bit cold we can fire up the wood burner....We aren't cold because since moving in there hasn't been a blanket in sight on the sofa ..... We haven't had our first electricity bill yet but I'm guessing it's going to be much lower than the £100 a week as it used to cost us....

Xbox boy is going for his second mock selection in a few days as he failed his first one, we've been trying to get him out running and generally getting fit for it but he seems to be alarmingly relaxed about it all, I've told him that passing selection just means you have the basic level of fitness required to START basic training, it doesn't mean you'll get through it....so scraping through (which he hasn't done yet, mock or otherwise) just isn't good enough. He has absolutely no idea how hard it is..... I've told him he needs to fly through selection otherwise he will find basic training extremely tough if not impossible ...Plus they won't keep putting him through mock selections forever, this is probably his last chance before they turn around and tell him to bugger off go away permanently because he isn't fit enough..... but my advice seems to be falling on completely deaf ears....hey ho not a lot more I can do really....

Friday 18 February 2011

Well so far

I've managed to fall off the last step of our stairs three times with a full cup of coffee and splash a large proportion of it on our nice marble floor. I seem to manage it with irritating consistency usually at around 7:30am ish, and only it seems on the way down them, not on the way up them, which would be ten times worse because it's a light coloured carpet and I'd like to keep it that way...

I have figured out why I'm doing it though, the hand rail/banister ends before the last step, so in my sleep deprived head my hand reaches the end of the rail/banister and my brain assumes like most normal stairs that the stair also ends at that point....so my brain engages the autonomic function of expecting the hard ground beneath my feet when in fact there is just air and a 12 inch gap of air at that... hence my almost drunken lunge forward and madly wheeling around like Max Wall trying to stop my coffee from slopping over the side and failing very miserably ....

No doubt I'll get the hang of the stairs in a couple of years, that or I'll end up breaking my ankle a few times.

but on the up side I have become expert at deftly swabbing the floor with a tea towel and extended foot.

on the heating side we're getting a lovely wood burner fitted next week (allegedly...if they bother turning up, we all know about the Pembrokeshire promise) so that should cut down on our reliance on the storage heaters.... although I've calculated that even if we put storage heaters in our old house we would still have spent less per year than heating oil, so my guess is in our super  "A" rated insulated house our bills will be considerably less than the monthly money burning ceremony to the fossil fuel alter we were used to in our old house....

this weekend I intend to be considerably less busy and physically broken as I was last weekend... I've decided !!!

Wednesday 16 February 2011

We're in....

It took two days to move and a further half day to clean the old house to a respectable standard, thanks to the diligent cleaning skills of Andrea... I was the muscle along with a sterling effort by Xbox boy, FOMO boy managed to do practically nothing regarding the move only eclipsed by the sullen one's lack of help... FOMO boy lost interest slightly quicker than a bored puppy and had the odd poody when asked to move or do anything... The sullen one managed to get out of any heavy lifting completely by managing to get some casual work (planned or what ??)..

I have to admit that I had a complete sense of humour failure on day two on a few occasions... The main fuse blowing session was after a hard days slog moving furniture and beds and everything else.... when the sullen one refused to sleep in her bedroom with just her bed in it... in other words she was expecting us to carry on dragging her stuff from her old bedroom to her new one when she hadn't lifted a finger to help...(plus it was late in the day)

I'm very much of the mind that if you don't pull your finger out and help then don't expect anybody to help you, Andrea is a much softer touch than I am, and I ended up going the  extra mile for Andrea not the sullen one...whom I would have quite happily let sulk in her new bedroom with just her bed that night and not cared in the slightest.... :) ... needless to say the "friends" of the sullen one didn't turn up to help... shock horror....Although Xbox boy's new and much improved girlfriend did and proved very useful...

We are now getting our heads around the uncontrollability of electric storage heaters which require the ability to know how warm it is going to be the next day and if you get it wrong you either fry yourself or freeze yourself...thus far we've managed both... we are having a wood burner fitted which should give us some control over when we have heat rather than it either being either there or not... one thing for certain we can at least be warm in the new house, something which evaded us in the old one except on the warmest of days....

I can see the xbox being bandwidth throttled to stop inanely excitable one sided conversations being overheard in the large open plan lounge, FOMO boy very nearly got throttled himself last night if I had heard "Cameron !!! Get in the lift, GET IN THE LIFT !! the zombies are coming" one more time... thankfully Xbox boy came home and kicked him off it before any throttling was required...

Although Xbox boy got a roasting for leaving his bedroom resembling a land fill site only slightly untidier, which brought the wrath of Andrea on his head.... on top of which he's had his working hours reduced which I'm beginning to wonder if that might suit him down to the ground a little too much, if you get my drift....or to put it another way the absolute minimum effort required to remain classed as a working individual....Hmmmmmmmm

Hopefully the Army will get their hands on him soon and they will knock him into shape... literally.... one thing for certain his xbox days will be a thing of the past...A sweet distant memory of fruitless and often inane entertainment....

Thursday 10 February 2011

Some kind person

Probably bladdered from booze from the local pub smashed the rear window on our car last night, which is going to cost us £60 to fix it... it beggars belief how or what they got out of throwing a piece of masonry through the rear window...(the MOST expensive window).... I suppose the only "up" side is that they didn't damage the bodywork....

Had I caught them, I would have added to their experience of window smashing and very probably put them off smashing any further car windscreens for life, and they quite probably would have ended up with a fear of dentists....

luckily for them we didn't hear it being smashed or I would have been out there like a scolded cat and cracked a few pavements with their head... or anything else I could find to bang off the pavement.....although banging their empty head off the pavement would probably have been a pointless past time....

Mind you in this day and age had I done that I would very probably been arrested for assault in this upside down world we live in, where the criminal can claim to be hard done by, whilst the victim bears the cost and the blame. So it's probably for the best that I didn't hear it....because I would have found it extremely difficult to turn the other cheek...

It really annoys me this senseless destruction of other peoples property. Where has all the respect gone ? but I guess when you've only got two brain cells sozzled with booze to rub together thinking beyond the here and now is beyond them...

I will be setting the car alarm in future and they had better be fast runners.....

Wednesday 9 February 2011

M-Day Approacheth

We've done most of the "must do" stuff such as broadband/phone and electricity and the rest we'll do once we are ensconced in our new abode... tomorrow night we will dismantle the beds ready for the move and sleep on the mattresses... I've managed to get hold of a friends van to assist us and on Thursday night we get the keys, so my guess is the move will start Thursday night (knowing Andrea) for a few hours then re-commence on the Friday, we should be done by the end of Friday all being well....

We have two teenagers and one on standby to assist although I'm guessing all three of them won't excel with their spatial ability at all and will have to be told to breath in and out to keep going....

My only real worry is Xbox boy's sofa bed which has the combined weight of a lead lined coffin and a wheelbarrow full of wet sand... plus it's wider than the door it went through and requires the spatial capacity of several humans and the brute force of at least two silver back gorilla's to lift and manoeuvre it out of his pit and into the street and onto the van.... I might just remove the bed part which would make it lighter to move around the sofa bit than the last time when I very nearly bust a blood vessel moving it....

The only problem I have in moving house is that I don't like to hang about discussing things I'm a bit like a guided missile in that I carry on flying until I hit the target....(that bit I get from my father I think)

I have a cunning plan regarding the teenagers in that their bedrooms will be the last to be moved and the laziest of the teenagers will be the one who has their bedroom moved last (it wouldn't be fair to name her)..... thereby giving them no excuse to bugger off once their bedroom has been moved...(as happened the last time)

We are NOT being left to do all this by ourselves again and I can see all hell breaking loose if we get a repeat of last time...




there will be blood on the moon make no mistake about it.....

Wednesday 2 February 2011

The joys of house moving

We will be redirecting our redirected mail which will then go to our new house, complicated I know but you never know what will slip through the net if you don't .... I've contacted Post Office broadband which were most helpful but they failed to identify that the house has a phone line and BT socket... which it does... both can be plainly seen.... so we shall see if we get slapped for the £112 new line fee, which will shortly be followed by a "over my cold dead body" letter of complaint.

We will move in on the Friday and the new wood burner arrives on the Monday.... The fact that they've had nearly a month to get their act together is neither here nor there... you'd think they would want to install it before we moved in .... but alas no....that would be too simple it seems.

We have a contact near Laugharne who will supply us with logs for the wood burner but I should imagine it's multifuel so it will probably burn soft coal as well... so our options are open. Lauren's happy because her new bedroom is beyond toasty so for the first time in months she'll not need to dress up like Capt Oates to venture into her small part of the arctic she calls her bedroom. But in the new house she will be in great danger of losing her computer speakers if she continues blasting out inane Rihanna "beat me to death with a length of lead piping because I like it" type songs....

Xbox boy isn't as happy he has an open plan bedroom but he will have a new home soon in the Army so it's not much of an issue but at nineteen years old he'd be out on his ear anyway. Both Andrea and I left home way before nineteen so the sympathy is thin on the ground...

We aren't ones who agree with children/teenagers hanging onto their mothers apron strings much past eighteen and if I had my way it would be seventeen or possibly earlier, when I hit sixteen I wanted to be out in the world finding my feet myself.... it seems this generation are dragging theirs.....probably because it's a bit too comfortable methinks.....

The new house is a lovely converted chapel (with parking!!) I remember it from when I lived in Laugharne as a boy it was used as a large workshop then repairing and modifying rally cars...so it's very open plan and airy but more importantly it's warm !! our old house used to have brass monkeys when we moved in but they've all left now for a house that remains slightly above freezing even when the oil burner is running like a Tornado GR4 jet engine on afterburner for most of the day...to say our old house is difficult to heat is an understatement. I think if we set fire to our furniture in the front room it would barely get comfortable in there ....and whoever planned the radiators for that place was probably having a laugh it's like lighting a match in a tent... comforting but pointless...

We knew the house we are in now was short term, and we took it because we needed eyes on the ground in Laugharne to see if anything popped up that was suitable for our tribe and we've come up trumps!!! :)
So we shall see how things pan out... I'm sure everything will be fine...

The only other thing I can report is that I averted us being blown to bits last night because I couldn't sleep mainly because Andrea couldn't sleep so I eventually tutted and made my way downstairs only to find a strong smell of gas in the kitchen, I resisted the temptation of turning the lights on and opened the back door then went to the hob to find that one of the gas rings was on but not lit... I vented the room and checked Laurens room and it was gas free... That could have been a nasty wake up call when the oil boiler fired in the morning... I suppose the only silver lining would have been that the ensuing massive gas explosion would have tidied Laurens bedroom for her....