Mostly lemon based

Category: House

Capped and Tiled

So, our roof was, as was suspected, hideous. Although the original survey stated ‘The roof will need to be replaced at some point in the future’, a statement that I felt was both startlingly accurate and also startlingly useless (up there with ‘surveyors are unable to see through solid walls’), I’d hoped it’d make it until we sell up and dash off to another land.

It had become apparent that this wasn’t going to happen last year, but the temporary repair held up until… well… late summer? So the scaffolding went up a bit over a week ago, and then last week, the roofer turned up and revealed horrors. Unfortunately I didn’t shimmy up the scaffold before they’d cleared the tiles off. Although I’d thought that the problems were mainly down to the valley rusting through (and cracking, it turns out), they actually went somewhat further. The valley was structured incorrectly, and the felt under the tiles was allowing water to run underneath it. Also, the felt at the bottom edge of the roof had rotted away almost completely…

As we’d agreed – and he’d presumed – he completely stripped the bay and also stripped back into the main roof allowing him to put new felt and battens down on the bay and on the renewed sections of the main roof.

Annoyingly, again, I didn’t take a shot that captured how far across they went (it was a few tiles into the main roof)… but I wasn’t going to spend the whole day up on the scaffold.

We didn’t get the tiles replaced either, well, a few were replaced but most were just reused. One of the ridge tiles disintegrated, so that’s been replaced but all the replacements were reclaimed. We could have gone for new tiles but I didn’t really want to have a completely different looking bay – it suggests that you might need to do the rest of the roof soon. Or at least, that’s what it suggests to me.

Anyhow, the new valleys look pretty damn good (a hell of a lot better than what was there), and apart from one tile that he didn’t replace that I’d’ve gone for changing (it’s delaminating a bit, if that’s the term for ceramic tiles disintegrating).

And the ridge is looking a hell of a lot better:

As a bonus whilst he was up there he capped off the two chimney stacks that we don’t use (front and rear bedroom)… Which means we’ve finally got them properly capped at the top and bottom (with a nice ventilator in them at the base). So whilst I’ve barely got off my arse, and progress inside has been non-existent, there has been actual progress on the house.

Hopefully this year we can have a warm and dry Christmas (and the same to all of you lovely folks :) )

23/12/2014
Finally, finally.

So, I’ve been crossing items off a list that doesn’t really exist except in my head.

I’ve fixed the dishwasher, I think. It’s working at least and not tripping the RCD. The noise suppression capacitor on the mains appears to have been the fault… it’s quite nice to throw things in and have them come out clean without worrying about the fridge.

Kathryn and I have finally replaced the bit of wood that belongs under the last cupboard in the kitchen:

Before:

(Note the little teeny gap at the end where it was cut to the wrong length by our kitchen designer)…

And After:

That teensy tiny fix has been hanging around since a few weeks after our kitchen was installed when he turned up with the corrected bit. And it’s quietly bugged me for ages.

I’ve repaired the earth lead on the anglepoise Kathryn uses as a bedside lamp. That has been broken, err, for years.

And I’ve also filed my paperwork and cleared some of the office in preparation for our Thanksgiving which, we’re planning to hold in the LibrarOfficeSpareRoom. I’ve registered at the GP for online access (and sorted my repeat prescription), I’ve checked the deeds for our house and found that our fence is, apparently, shared, and that we’ll have to share the cost of rebuilding the disintegrating wall (oh woo). At least, according to our deeds. Oh, and I’ve swept the stairs.

I’ve also, I think, killed the RiscPC. It does power up now but behaves incredibly erratically, so I think I need to fish it out and see if the power supply is dead. The supplies on them were always a trifle sketchy, so I’ll have a look at some point. Also, the CMOS battery in it has definitely died, this I can deduce from the fact it thinks it’s 1900.

What is astonishing about it is how quick it still feels. As soon as you try and ‘do’ anything, the fact that it’s nearly 20 years old becomes rapidly apparent; the machine grinds and churns; loading webpages for example, is not a quick experience. But when you do OS based stuff, it’s FAST. Ah well, part of the reason I loved the OS then was how light and quick it was.

Anyhow.

I should finish my cup of tea and get on.

11/11/2014
Wishy Washy

A while back (quite a while, if I’m honest) our dishwasher started to behave in a manner which I considered was unfortunate. It’s on a timer, so it’s meant to run overnight, which it was doing. However, having finished the cleansing of the dishes, it would dry them and then with concerning frequency, it’d trip the RCD. This was irritating in a number of ways.

The fridge is on that circuit.
The upstairs lights are on that RCD.
The media server is on that RCD too, and it really doesn’t like people taking its power away without warning.

Also, obviously, there was the concerning fact that…it was tripping the RCD, there was clearly a fault. But an intermittent one.

I’d have actually been happier, at the time, if it had completely died, rather than this irritating initially once every few weeks, then once every few cycles, then fairly much every cycle failure because it mean that I ‘really should’ look at what was wrong with it. Because it might both be within the bounds of my repair skills, and within the level of effort I’m willing to put in for a 15 year old dishwasher that doesn’t have its own internal timer.

Although, the final few test cycles I did demonstrated that even with it switched off, it could trip the RCD, which indicated that it was either the cable or this side of the power switch, which gave me more hope for finding the fault.

Despite that, I must admit I spent much time dinking on ebay checking out the cost of second hand dishwashers. It turns out they’re not quite cheap enough to cross the line of “well, fuckit”. Especially since the amount I was willing to spend is pretty low (although for something a bit more hardy, like a Miele, I’d’ve gone a bit further, but not apparently sufficiently far).

Anyhow, today we finally dragged it out from its resting place and having yanked the covers I spent some time staring at it. Mainly. I found that the ‘flexible’ cable that goes to the front panel is getting a bit worn; I think I might want to fix that. But eventually, I managed to yank the mains filter:

Hrm, this thing that’s a bit melty, and who’s potting compound has cracked, I’m slightly suspicious of it.

So for a tenner I’ve a new one winging its way to me. Which unfortunately means pulling the machine out from its resting place again… but hey, maybe it’ll work again. Which will reduce the mammoth washing up sessh’s back to their more normal frequency and free up more working on the house time. Because I really should finish painting the trim, ideally this century.

31/10/2014
The Awesome Power

So I’ve given in. I don’t think I mentioned on here, but we finally bought a modern car (lookie, a post at Transport Evolved, where I’m a staff writer now!). I’m planning to cut my hours at my main job to do a bit more agency work; with the theory being that we might be able to save a more significant sum of money up. I suspected that the Austin would probably not tolerate this very well, and moreover given that there’s less than 500 of them left, in total, it seemed a shame to throw that many miles onto it.

Not only that, but we saw this (which when the link dies is a small live/work shop in Port Townsend that we can actually afford to buy outright). It’s fracking tempting, and I have this sort of sensation that we really should just go for it, but also, we don’t want to end up in the US broke and with no health insurance. That way lies insanity.

On the other hand, if we owned somewhere outright our outgoings’d drop pretty dramatically.

But our house isn’t finished and so isn’t terribly sellable, so that kind of puts a crimp in that concept anyway.

Anyhow, as part of the process of selling the Austin off (which if anyone’s interested, I’m looking for around £1700) I’ve scrounged Nikki’s DA polisher, some paint restorer and some of her much-higher-quality-than-I-use-car polish. So I wandered outside this afternoon having completed my other exciting tasks for the day (go and get a polishing sleeve for the polisher; clean the steering wheel and switchgear and some other bits and bobs of the new car because they were hideously filthy it having been owned by a builder; spent several (quite a lot of) minutes trying (and failing) to persuade the Prius and the iPhone to talk / transfer contacts; organising Kathryn’s anniversary present…) and I gathered together the stuff to wash and polish the car.

I washed it and grabbed the cutting compound… it said ‘wash and dry the car’ so I waited whilst it dried, applied the cutting compound and followed the instructions which ended with allow to dry. Literally as I finished applying the last bit to the roof it started to rain.

I waited it out for a while, washing the Prius somewhat (which needs some cutting back in a few places too, being as a few places have paint transferred from other objects that the previous owner’s run into on them) before finally wiping off the worst of the cutting compound from the austin with the rain and heading inside. I really need to get it sold though because (a) I could do with some of the money back from the insurance and (b) It’s just sat cluttering up the street and (c) I could use the money back from the Austin to pay for some of the stuff that I had done to it to get it decently roadworthy. So I may have to have a look at it this weekend. Once it’s cleaned I need to tidy up the joint in the exhaust that I threw together when I was putting it on in a hurry (which is leaking), clean the inside and photograph the car. Then it should be good to go.

I’m hoping this will feel like progress because at the moment I’m feeling terribly frustrated. We’re hoping to try for baby-stuff again this month, which should also feel like progress; but having been on holiday the house feels very stalled; and we’ve neither of us made great progress on the planning of the grand adventure nor of the possibility of just dropping that and going to start our bookshop.

Feh, basically.

23/10/2014
Standards (slipping)

In the majority of the house I’ve worked really hard to do things to a good standard. Not an exceptional standard, but a very adequate standard. We’ve employed good (or at least reasonable) builders who’ve done work that I’ve been satisfied with. Our plasterer was really good, our electrician and plumbers were exceptional.

But there are a couple of areas where things could have been a little better. I could have insulated under the lounge floor before they refinished it; that would have been a good plan. We could have had under floor heating in the kitchen. And we could have tiled the bathroom floor rather than using lino.

But in all honesty, the areas where we’ve shaved a touch off to save money have been pretty minimal. And the effects have mainly been well hidden.

But there is one area where we have ignored the problem. The outbuilding (was once a kitchen extension) is just attrocious quality. Really dreadful. And that’s fine, it’s been tied in to the rest of the house at some point, so we’re not worried that it’ll suddenly fall down, but it is just shonky as all hell. And one of its “features” is that the doorframe is vastly unsquare.

I mean, it’s not even close to square. It may have a distant aunt that had once heard of a rectangle. The builders looked at it and discovered that, as was common for buildings of that sort at the time it was probably built, the top of the doorframe, that jauntily angled piece of wood, that is the lintel. So to take it down would require using acros and all sorts of exciting fun.

So instead they took the scabbiest piece of wood they could find, roughly planed it down and slapped it on to the top of the door frame to make it sort-of-square, so we could fit a new (reclaimed, square) door. The old one being more rotten than our compost heap.

And lo I finally got to trying to paint it. Yes, I have left it nearly 2 years.

It now consists of a large quantity of filler to try and make it all blend in. I could have taken it off, made a nicer bit of wood, put it back with it all being much closer to the right size. But no, I’ve spent probably longer than it would’ve taken me to cut and plane a better bit of wood to fill the space with filler. So that was wise.

Never mind. The main target of this fun activity is actually the bit of wood that makes up part of the roof trim, which I’m hoping to start work on tomorrow. I didn’t want to be clambering around on the deck on a ladder with Kathryn not here though. Just in case I decide to try and fall off it. Y’know. Like you do.

So anyhow, there’ll be pictures, at some point. When it’s finished and looks respectable, and not like a heap of filler stuck to a doorframe.

I think I’ve fixed many of the house’s problems, I’ve got some work to do on the render that I’m going to do properly, too, so I’m inclined to say I can leave this one to the next owner to solve… which’ll probably be when they want to have a proper extension built.

26/9/2014
How green does your garden grow?

So, another couple of afternoons of work in the garden. Well, part of an afternoon, I’ve made a little more progress. I spent most of Wednesday afternoon burning stuff. We had vast piles of cut-back brambles and cut-back and pulled lyme tree chunks which we could have put in the car and taken to the tip, but it’d’ve taken several trips and got the car full of both bugs and dirt.

Instead it all went through the incinerator in an afternoon filled with incineration. The garden looked much better because of it, and it meant that I could get back to the strip of rocks/gravel that is meant to live between the garage and the grass and pull out all the ‘nice’ bits of stone (quarried from Bristol in the 18th Ct, and taken out of an old wall that was being pulled down). I’d hoped I’d have enough ‘nice’ stone to dress the whole top edge of it:

Sadly I’ve now run out. That said I’m not 100% convinced I like the final look. I’m wondering if gravel would be better. Also I’m a bit short on hardcore to go underneath it, ‘cos I’ll probably want to retrieve some of the bricks I’ve got at the end that I’ve not done yet to use as path edging. On the plus side I did get to meet 3 cute little froggies who are living in there. Which does kinda incline me to keep the rock effect, I like them having somewhere to live.

Yesterday I did a bit more work on the path – creeping us forward another 4 or so feet. I also spent some time hoe-ing a bed and then threw cardboard and mulch material over it; which has proven to be an adequate, if not ideal technique for keeping weeds at bay.

And here’s a moment of what we’re going for:

Path

Given the weather I think I should probably get on with more serious stuff, like the fact that a chunk of render’s fallen off our outbuilding, that the paint’s flaking off the wall underneath where we had the boiler removed (so there’s no render on that bit) and there’s a bit of wood trim that’s gone rotten.

Something for me to look forward to, anyhow.

19/9/2014
Gardening glut

So this weekend has been a proper weekend with relaxing and doing gardening and enjoying the world. As I was chatting to my neighbour I was discussing the fact that we’re approaching the next period of time when I actually have to do some maintenance on the house, which’ll be not nearly so much fun.

But for the moment, I’ve been out there gardening and starting to prep the garden for autumn and winter.

The vertical garden we just let do its own thing. Every so often we throw more soil and compost in the top because we didn’t know how to build it when we made it, and now have various problems with the soil leaking out. Apart from that we periodically chuck new plants into it to see what does well, usually by a process of the previous plant dying. Thyme and ~~the big leafy plant who’s name is totally escaping me but is delicious and lemony~~ Sorrel. with fish, incidentally.
(more…)

15/9/2014
It mayn’t look like much

So our garden looks like we’ve kinda let nature go wild on a mixture of slightly selected plants. I actually kind of adore it and am endlessly frustrated by it. Back in Slough we did one thing really right; we planned it out and then dug the whole lot over, pretty much. So when it was laid out we weren’t faced with bits that weren’t path but still have grass on because they’ve not yet been dug into the beds.

So I’m creeping around and doing a bit here and a bit there to clear the grass off what will be the beds. And given that I couldn’t do anything much else, this afternoon was spent clearing a bit more. So the patch under the apple tree at the bottom, between the apple tree and this year’s potato bed, that’s looking pretty much sorted. There’s some scrubby patches off near the edges that need a little more, but when we dig it over with some compost or manure, or some mix of the two, that should improve that.

That scrubby patch of grass off to the right is where the path will run. I need to lop a bit of wood off and then plonk the gravel around for that bit…. The other issue down there is that the hedge is seriously overgrown, but that’s a problem for a whole other day, that’s my opinion!

This big patch of scrubby grass is where we’re moving all the turf to. I don’t seem to have a photo of it but it’s been the scabby bit of land between our garage and our lowest terrace; the intention is that next year we’ll have a hammock over it, because it’s the one bit of our garden that gets shade in the early evening and afternoon. It’s horribly uneven because I literally dump whatever chunks of grass I dig up from other sections onto it and then leave it to see if it takes. I did water it in the heat of the summer, but that’s been the total extent of my love and kindness to it.

It’s quite nicely meadowy when it takes though, and we’ll probably try and find some meadow seeds to throw into it, to make ourselves a little mini wildflower meadow to hide in.

Looking up from the same place you can see that things have got a little exuberant; there’s quite a bit of weeding to do (which I did a little of today). You can also see the plum tree…

Which provided this delicious morsel!

We bought that tree as one of three from a farm shop (by which we mean a shop in which farmers buy 10s of trees to build up orchards) in Cornwall: a plum and apple and a cherry. The apple is fantastic (James Grieves, I think, is the variety and it’s delicious) and has been really productive this year. The cherry we never get anything off, because the birds eat every damn thing, and this year is the first year the plum’s produced anything. This is the first one I’ve eaten…and it was worth the wait. Lord it was yummy.

And then, finally we come to this. It may not look like much, but it’s a mixture of lots of carrots, celeriac and some poppies. I think there might be some fennel hiding in there too! It’s a raised bed that I threw together to try and keep the slug problem down a bit. It seems to have worked, by throwing lots of nematode stuff in there, and lots of slug-killing pellets, it now seems to have reached a more controlled stage where we don’t seem to need to do too much with it. The carrots and other veg seem to be growing pretty enthusiastically…

Next year we shall have to top up the soil a fair bit, because we didn’t have enough to fill it this year. Not that we want it complete full, but fuller’n it is.

So it is coming along, in a kind of slightly half-arsed way.

15/8/2014
Mini Triptych

– I am becoming an occasional staff writer for Transport Evolved. Don’t think I don’t see the irony in that, I own a bike from the 1930s (pushbike), a 60’s car, a 70’s car and a pre-production EV. That said, I’m the head of The Electric Minor Project, so that probably has more to do with it! You can see my Staff Car Report up there, if you’re so inclined.

– I keep getting lost down the rabbit hole with respect to our media server. It’s reached the end of hardware support for my chosen OS and I keep thinking, well, should I actually replace it. It still works… Anyhow I’ve been dinking and still go no answer, but am pleased to find I’m just as geeky as I always have been and am quite happy to spend an inordinately long time trying to work out what the cost/benefit ratio is of getting each processor. And how far back in history I have to go to get a decent one. And whether I’m better off getting an older-faster or a newer-architecture-slower one.

– Our dishwasher’s died and it turns out I still dislike doing the washing up. I’m not sure how long my streak of ‘I will wash up every day’ will survive. Part of me thinks I should look at the dishwasher and see if I can fix it, but frankly, it’s 15 years old – at least – and is shorting to earth, only intermittently at the end of its cycle. Spares for it are, broadly speaking, unavailable. Leading me to conclude that I probably can’t be arsed to fix it. Which is terrible. And I am a terrible, weak person, but buying a replacement second hand one just seems much, much easier. Never mind.

14/8/2014
Advantage: Guests

So, we’ve had a couple of friends staying for the last two days. They’re over from the States and a while back asked if they could drop in sort of on their way home, before visiting a family member / London. They’d clearly heard how awesome Bristol is and wanted to visit :)

Anyhow, to prepare for their visit meant finding the bedroom again. The front bedroom (ironically the ‘master’ of the house’s bedrooms and also the one we use least (it faces the road rather than the woods)) had been gradually filled with crap. Crap for the charity shops. Crap for e-bay. Crap that should have gone in the bin, and boxes and boxes of stuff we’d not unpacked, but that we’d also declared would not go into the attic to just sit there until it had been sorted.

This visit was, thankfully, arranged with enough time that we actually did it. We went through the boxes. We threw out, recycled, charity-shopped and charity-furniture-group’d so much stuff that the room now looks incredibly spacious. I can actually see myself being able to recover the chaise* in the space up there.

There’s a few boxes, but they’re things that shouldn’t be chucked, things that can’t be unpacked here because the desk in the office isn’t quite big enough, and still a box of stuff to go on ebay when I get the time / chance.

Anyhow, we had a very nice time with our visitors – took them to the Roman Baths, out to dinner at ‘Same, Same, but Different’ on their first afternoon here, and then on a whirlwind tour of Brizzle on the second day – breakfast from Hart’s Bakery, a visit to the M-shed, the Harbourside, a quick look at Bristol Central Library (so pretty inside the reference room and entry way**) up to Clifton village, on to the Downs (for a picnic and a chat), then down to the river near where we live… fed them Bristol’s best Fish and Chips with some nice cider whilst relaxing on the deck, and then back into the house for a quick episode of Miranda as the evening faded.

It’s difficult though. I mean, there’s so much we didn’t show them; Stokes Croft, the Cube, the Arnolfini (which we just wandered past), the Watershed, Gloucester Road… it’s so hard to cram what we love about Bristol into one day. Still, without making it all running about the place, it was a nice day and I think they had fun, which is really the point.

So all good really.

Now we just need to keep the house as tidy as it is now – and I need to get back to decorating.

* which I note I’ve never got a picture of, so I must do that before I start…
…although I still don’t strictly understand what is original structure on it, and what is later additions, and how the hell it originally looked

** Really sadly, the Book Hive exhibit had finished:

25/7/2014