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Yes, it’s time for the traditional trying to stay awake coming off nights ramble. I’ve now been awake for 26 hours (approx) and am really, really tired. Having finished a fairly busy shift (the beginning was really busy), been told I’m racist (against one specific white person) and sat in a very long queue to get home, I painted the top foot of the brick (deplastered) wall, the idea being that when we got back from “errands” I’d put another coat on. That….didn’t happen.

Then we breakfasted, collected our 110V power supply (carrying it rather further than we needed to, having parked somewhere quite close while I got cash out…). Those yellow 110V building site supplies? They’re actually fucking heavy. Just so as you know.

Well, okay, not fucking heavy. They’re quite heavy and difficult to carry, at least, when you’re not willing to essentially hug it because you’re wearing clean and wholly inappropriate clothing. Then we went…err.. oh yes, in search of crates. If anyone has good suggestions for obtaining 8 or 9 wine crates in Bristol for little money we’d be grateful – although we have one lead. Today’s attempt to get them was unsuccessful, it seems that the place we looked is only open on Saturdays. Then we headed to Gloucester Road for our weekly shop… and a visit to Coffee Number One. Yay!

Yet more of a jaunt over to the (pricey) reclamation place, who wanted £140 for the slab of ex-snooker-table slate we were thinking of making into a table. I say ‘were thinking’ because not only is the cost somewhat prohibative, but they’ve also sold, I think, the thinner ones we saw last time we were there which would probably have been okay. The actual pool table ones that are there at the moment, I don’t think we could lift – and given that we’ve no longer got the circular saw (thanks thieves, hope you get caught), would need to pay someone to cut it (probably we’d need to anyway, to get a decent line) which would put the price up even more. Which is a shame. But given it’s weight it’d probably drop through the floor anyhow.

So we’re contemplating other table-top options. We have legs, just no top.

Then we went to the woodyard and ordered the wood that will make up my desk. Woo!

I am, now, waiting for the drill to arrive. Or indeed for confirmation of shipping. I’m also waiting for the jigsaw to arrive (or indeed confirmation of shipping).

Finally we made it home, and footled one of the kitchen units roughly into position. It looks *lovely*. But it does require some planing at the back, and a little modification to allow it to clear the skirting… Tomorrow is to be a busy day. But now I’m going to take my sleep deprived self to the kitchen for food, and then I’m going to watch a film and go to bed.

New pulleys for table saws of unknown origin (but oldish) – easy to get? Where’d I get one from?

No, seriously. I don’t.

Before we moved I’d very little experience with criminal activity*. When I was 14 someone broke into Rebecca’s garage and stole the tools** (but thankfully not Rebecca), and someone once broke into Nina (my old VW Golf) stealing nothing but permanently damaging the back door. And I suppose in Slough someone removed the scrap batteries from the drive at the front of the house, which is not surprising, but was faintly annoying.

But since we’ve moved here we’ve had:
– Greenhouse stolen from a property from which we were going to go and collect it.
– Sofa collected by company who claim to still be trading but aren’t and have disappeared with our property – the owners have also disappeared and their premises have been repossessed (and were apparently empty when repossessed) thus making them very hard to trace. Still not sure what to do about that.
– Break-in to our garage

And today I found out that the table saw we’d bought (nice old 1960’s stanley bridges mini-beast) has been stolen from whence it was to be collected. This is upsetting for multiple reasons: it means that the cunning ‘two items collected on one collection fee’ trick may not work – I’m not quite sure what the courier company are going to say. They went there, and rang saying “the saw’s not there” apparently. The saw was very cheap for what it was – it needed a replacement power switch, which didn’t bother me, but did put off everyone else, it seems. And of course, now I need to find another alternative – and finding something of similarly good quality without paying a ridiculous price is going to be difficult.

I’m vaguely contemplating that maybe we should mark up the stuff and rent a saw, because the crappy arse tools that I can afford in the table saw area are a world more crappy than the tools I can justify/afford in the smaller power tools area :(

* I’m not counting here a certain Morris Minor company who’s activity I’d regard as criminal, but who get of scot free because the laws in this country are ridiculous.
** Something which makes me sad to this day, because my dad’d given me a set of tools that he’d had as a kid – and a massive new toolbox rammed full with nice spanners and socket sets, etc.

So, as you may or may not have gathered – radio silence has been more common of late thanks to university and house I suppose – I’m on nights. Night 5 of 8 tonight. Unfortunately, I got woken in that way which means I currently feel faintly dozy and all I want to do is curl up and sleep some more.

There is, however, exciting news afoot. The electrics are now complete, which I think hits the awesome-cool state. And, more excitingly, the kitchen has (started to) arrive. It actually could all be here, it’s all ready, but it’s difficult for us to get it into the house, since there’s no storage in the house, so he’s generously offered to hold onto two(/three)* of the units for a little bit while we get the first two(/three) units in. This is made marginally more complex by the fact that we lent our jigsaw to my mum, who is in Cornwall. It’s a nasty cheap jigsaw anyway, so we’re going to have to get a replacement I fear. I’ve looked on the ‘bay, because a second hand really nice would would be better, I suspect, than a fairly basic bosch/black&decker or whatever’s kicking around.

The problem with buying tools, I find, is that either I’d rather buy really really old ones (better quality) or find myself cursing the idea of buying new ones because we are planning to be in Canada where 240V tools will be useless. Ah well.

I’m still trying to get a decent drill press**, or at least a semi-decent one. I may have to settle for the Ferm one, which I’m sure will be adequate, but isn’t as nice as getting something of ‘better’ quality. I nearly got a rather nice one, but was outbid by 2p. Anyhow. I best get ready for work, since they’re probably expecting me to turn up and all :)

* It’s a cupboard and an L-shaped cupboard/shelf unit. The shelves are separate, but need to be screwed to the cupboard once installed, so I think he refers to them as 3 units, and we as 2.
** For other jobs, not kitchen related.

So, we have an ancient iron. I think it’s 1960s, which is not totally ancient, but is pretty old as far as consumer electricals go. We also have a 30mA RCD. This, it turns out, is not a combination that leads to joy.

Anyone with better electronics knowledge than me have any suggestions as to how to stop our beloved iron (which I love because it just works and works and works, not like this modern crap) from tripping the RCD most times that we use it? It usually only does it once, or maybe twice, but we didn’t notice today and thus left the house (most importantly, the fridge) without power for 4 hours.

Some shite scraped Rebecca, either today or yesterday…

I’m hoping that it’ll mostly polish out.

On the plus side, it turns out the 70 year old tyres on my push bike hold air. On the minus side I suspect that the bottom bearing on it might need replacing :-/

So, the insanity’s stopped me posting for a while. It’s been insanely hard going here recently, as we fly towards an optimistic completion date. Both Kathryn and I have been really quite busy, and between it and the MSc I’ve been a bit too busy to post.

So, anyhow. Kathryn’s been sanding the trim in the spare bedroom library – and has popped the first coat of paint on there; the skirting’s looking like it’s going to be very nice – indeed, the whole room is looking gorgeous. I’ve freecycled some scaffold poles and bought some scaffold joints to make the desk. Since finding how pretty scaffold board is, I’ve been really rather keen to have a scaffold plank desk – and what’s the obvious thing to support a scaffold plank desk? Scaffolding :)

Of course it needs a bit of cleaning up before installation and we need to decide if just ‘clean’ or painted is what we need in terms of look. (more…)

So, the theft of stuff, as a general group, has had a real effect on my mood. Thankfully they didn’t come into the house, and really what they took has so far seemed to be fairly easily replaceable (in terms of it’s physically easy to get a replacement) although financially it’s another matter.

I’ve been trying to get back to actually doing stuff, which is hard, for a number of reasons. One of which is the all pervading negativity that’s wrapped itself around me since finding out. We’ve put so much effort into the house, and since moving in we seem to have had a bit of a run of bad luck with stuff. Our art deco sofa that we picked out is missing thanks to Mrs Vivienne Manning, director of Manning Logistics LTD (and partner of Andy Manning) who’ve disappeared without a trace, presumably having stolen our property*.

If anyone runs into them, give them our number and say we’d like our stuff back, incidentally.

Anyhow, so having stuff stolen from the brand new garage is upsetting because I’d been all excited about finally having somewhere to put tools. Now I have somewhere to put tools where some fuck is going to steal them. Instead of having a nice space, I’m going to have to fix cabinets to walls/floors with big f-off locks. I don’t want to live in a fracking high security installation.

Anyhow, it’s also not great to be working, because while the lounge is lovely to chill out in, the big TV, despite being very cheap is noticably a big LCD screen. One must assume that someone looking through the window is unlikely to realise it’s end of line cheap telly. So we’ve kept the curtains closed and will have to put up some net to make it less easy to just look in. We don’t actually like net, but there you go.

So we’re essentially sitting in semi-darkness all the time. Illuminated by one old 60W bulb (yes, it will be an energy saver when we get a bit further along).

I’ve also been constantly thinking about alarm systems. I’ve finally bitten the bullet and ordered one today, though I suspect it’ll take a while to get here. It’s a relatively posh one, it’ll ring us if anyone breaks in and will apparently allow us to listen to what’s going on in the house. It’ll cover the garage as well as the house, and sports separate keypads for the garage and the house.

It remains, however, depressing.

On the plus side I’ve managed to engage with the world enough to put the filler in the kitchen ceiling, and I’ve been playing with the ViewSonic VMP74 which is, it seems, working. Using UPnP (Eyeconnect – other stuff seemed to not want to stream AVIs) we’ve got video streaming from the mac – although it’s not as high-def as I’d like. I think it’s downscaling the video to get it through the narrow pipe of wifi. I’m hoping that’s what it is. When things are set up a bit better it should be pulling stuff across a nice fast wired network, which should make it happier. I’m looking forward to when we have the EntMac set up and we can have music pulled over the network by the power of MAGIC!

So tomorrow, hopefully, I can put at least one coat of paint on the kitchen ceiling (the ideal would be two coats) – and perhaps regain some of the lost momentum. Today, though, I’ve got stuff I should be doing, which I’ve been studiously avoiding.

Oh, on the plus side (double plus good) I’ve managed to work out how you remove the seat on the GT-550 (and I worked it out all by myself**). Now I have temptation to go and buy a battery – although I’m not sure if my battery charger’s in the house, the garage, or stolen. The most annoying thing about the theft (apart from the loss of Kathryn’s bike which is definitely more annoying because it’s not insured thanks to Halifax’s Opaque insurance policy) is that we have no idea what’s been stolen. It’s very hard to work out what they’ve taken because we don’t entirely know what was there. And we’ve only got 3 months to work out what else they might have taken. Given the abandonment of the bike I’m wondering if I should have a wander around the area out the back of our house and see if anything else has been dumped. But I think mostly what they’ve taken is stuff with carry handles that’s easy to nick and sell. *sigh*.

* I can’t work out how the fuck I’m meant to take them to court given that their registered address has been repossessed & their registered home address isn’t, so far as I can tell, where they live anymore. I can send them a civil court claim, but since they won’t get it… well, then they can say ‘oh, we didn’t get it’. It just seems that it’s throwing good money after bad. Everyone directs me to someone else, no one is responsible for this limited company which isn’t trading, hasn’t submitted accounts, has no property and has disappeared with our furniture.

** If it were any easier to work it out then it would have had neon flipping lights flashing all around it with the release lever is here! in giant blinking scroll text. Doh!

So today we I found out (Kathryn’s not home to hear the shit news yet) that the home insurance policy does not cover such minor piffling items as a bike. Despite them asking me to run through the ‘High Risk’ items when I did named items for the policy, Halifax neglected to mention that bicycles aren’t included as standard.

When you get the booklet, in small tiny tiny print under high risk items, somewhere after ‘crowns, Arabian princes, priceless frog collections’ it says ‘oh, and bicycles’. Even the claims adjuster admitted that ‘the booklets aren’t very easy to follow’. Well, no. Not unless you’re into fucking insurance, no.

This however makes me more committed to working out what the hell else they might have taken, because at the moment, what they’ve taken is swallowed up by the policy excess. In which case, it’s probably not worth making a claim.

This might manage to get me over my failure to really develop hatred for the people who stole our stuff. Mostly I’ve been vaguely annoyed and stressed and quite down. Being a lefty liberal, some of me’s still stuck being nice about the shitty little sods. Commenting on bad choices, and so on. What I want to do is yell and shout about wanting to break their fingers, but I don’t, because I don’t want to. I want them to be caught and punished. I want justice done. But really, they’ve just annoyed and inconveninced me. However, they have just cost us £400 of bike, and right at this moment, I’m not exactly sure what the policy does cover, because everything seems to be listed under ‘exclusions’ (computers/electronics/cds/music/furniture/possessions/bricks/wood/anything containing any elements included in the periodic table). Might ring Halifax again and just check exactly what is included.

So, yesterday was a total high. We ‘finished’ the lounge. Well, actually, more accurately Kathryn’s slogged her guts out painting and so the room is completely painted. It’s not really ‘finished’, there’s still shelves to go up, the fire place still wants cleaning, we hadn’t actually put the telly on the wall, but we scrabbled around in our storage unit and got the sofa back to the house (and our standard lamp). We fell into bed tired but pleased. What we didn’t know is that either while we were at the unit, or sometime during the night to come someone would enter the garage and make off with a bunch of tools, my motorbike and Kathryn’s very nice pushbike.

They kicked down the back gate, wrenching the fence post from the wall of the garage. It never was intended to do more than provide a discouragement anyhow. Then they kicked / broke the lock on the garage side door, let themselves in, let themselves out with our stuff.

It’s worrying, there’s some important documents in there. There were a bunch of hand tools they’ve nicked, they went through some of the other boxes too, clearly looking for stuff they could quickly nick and flog. Ironically they missed (so far as I can tell) our ViewSonic net-TV adaptor. When I go down to put the alarm on there in a few minutes, I’ll check for Kathryn’s laptop – because it just occurred to me that that was in there, I think.

*sigh*.

Instead of spending the evening doing a smidge of work on the house, then doing my course, I got instead to talk to the police, and then spend an enjoyable few hours putting new padlocks on the doors, rehanging the gate and putting longer, nastier screws into the garage wall. But really? If someone wants to break into a wood framed garage? It’s never going to be impossible.

The geniuses who stole the bike made it about 100 meters before abandoning the MZ. Thankfully they didn’t take the uninsured GT550. The MZ, being it’s recalcitrant self, I suspect they tried to hot-wire. The faint hilarity of some stupid little scrote attempting to hot-wire a kickstart bike is not entirely lost on me, although the humour of the situation is limited at the moment. The police have actually expressed an interest, which surprised me, I assumed the crime would fall somewhere below ‘statistic’. Apparently, due to the government’s obsession with statistics, it’s a crime where, because they touched so much stuff they might actually CSI the garage and see if they can pull the scrote in off fingerprints.

Unfortunately, Kathryn’s very nice Giant bicycle did not get abandoned so conveniently. I’m not sure if she ever had it marked (and if it is marked, it’s probably with our old postcode).

Still, to cheer me up I’ve put the TV on the wall. Tomorrow I get to deal with insurance companies and so on.