Blog

I am not by nature a hugely patient person. I love the internet, and the instant gratification of buying online (WHEE! IT’s MINE!). I am not a huge consumer culture person, but music and film, they’re a huge part of my existence. I like to do things. I don’t get on well with waiting. It’s weird because I’m a terrible prevaricator. Take this, I should be working on my assignment, but while I’m waiting for lunch (well, the egg forming a lunch component) to cook I’m doing this instead. I’ve managed to avoid even looking at the university site all morning, which I think is, in a way quite impressive.

Annnyhow. For one who prevaricates, I’m also terribly impatient. Once I’ve gained momentum I want things to happen, and while I lay in the bath (we have no shower, still), contemplating things and whining about how 2011 has continued 2010’s monetary suckage, and that the whole concept of a year sucking is a bit dumb, because a year is just a human construct. I mean, I know it has it’s basis in nature and a revolution of the Earth, but the whole way we divide time is a human construct, largely. And One year sucking is no more a factor of which revolution of the Earth it is than any other. And expecting the change of position of the Earth to affect suckage, is well, dumb.

So yes. So when we moved we had momentum. We were trying to coax people into building for us. We had excitement. Now I’m just painfully frustrated. I’m frustrated because we can’t cook – and cooking is something I love. I love it because I get to spend quality time with my love, and we dance around the kitchen, we chat, we cuddle.

We. Cook. Together.

At the moment one of us tends the awkwardly placed (camping) stove (on the microwave, on the floor) and while we still talk, there’s no room for messing around gently, because you couldn’t fit a bloody cat in there with us, let alone swing it. So we’re quite keen to get our kitchen expanded out into the dining space, which is on the face of it fairly easy. Plan -> Building regs -> Approval -> Builders and Inspections -> Done. However since builders quote at the speed of glacial movement, actually getting to the point where we’ve got someone who says ‘Yes, I can do the structural survey and draw you a plan, submit it and get things going’ appears to involve several entire lifespans.

Promises, such as “I’ll get it to you before I go on holiday” do, in fact, feel, like they’ve been offered as placations despite meaning “I might get around to it when I get back”. The irony being most of them have commented on how they’ve got plenty of space in their schedules at the moment to do the work, because they’ve not got much on.

Do they not consider the possibility that this absence of work might be linked to the impossibility of getting quotes off them?

Gaaah.

It’s made more frustrating by paying 250 quid a month to store our stuff far away from the house, to keep it clean, while the building work notionally goes on. Were it to actually happen. At any point. This lifetime.

It’s made slightly more frustrating by buying water to drink, because the tap water’s a bit dubious. This’d be not so awful (hate the waste of plastic and energy transporting the water) but I bought Tesco Value water and it tastes fracking atrocious – metallic and sharp (although Kathryn thinks it tastes soft). Odd. Don’t like it anyhow. Which means I’m not drinking much water, which means I develop a headache.

Anyhow, so to give us the feeling of progress we’re going to go and dig the steam stripper out of the unit, and start stripping the wallpaper upstairs. This will, one imagines, give us a faint feeling of progress. I feel that I’m letting Kathryn down though, we both agreed we wouldn’t spend years living in a building site, and come month 2 we’ve still not actually got quotes for building work, and we’ve still not got any kind of schedule. The house is untouched, and I feel bad.

I have to say I have awesome respect for those who are engaged in much bigger projects and who whine far less than me (looking at you Wibble!).

I continue to mentally debate what to do with the Enfield. The G-Wiz has potentially a bit of interest, but the person who Nikki texted my number to hasn’t texted me. The Enfield I’m torn about. I want to get it going, but the probability of that occurring in the near future seems quite small. But then, if we finish the house when we plan – it’s not an unreasonable project…. Meh. The problem then is to store it until we work on it. Plan was to move it to our ‘drive’ (currently a stepped mass of concrete), but then the question arises of what we do with it when the builders are laying the new concrete. I suppose it’d only have to be ‘out’ for a few days. Perhaps we could rent some fencing and fence off the ‘road’ past the back of our house (given that no-one else uses it…). That might actually be a plan.

On the plus side, the new bras arrived yesterday – which means I’ve finally thrown away my selection of awful, nasty, tired, worn, ill fitting, grey bras. Along with them, my shiny shiny new vibrams arrived. And they rock.

As does this: http://hestaprynn.com/

So, things hae not particularly gone well at chez us. While we wait (and wait) for builders to return with quotes, made more complex by the fact that ‘green’ builders charge much more for their services, so instead we’re considering using non ‘green’ builders and they’re having the fun and games of learning about the products and tech we want to use which presumably is adding to the quote period. But since one of them is going away and promised to quote before he went away… well, we can but hope.

On the house, we’re waiting on two quotes, Timber Routes reckon roughly 20k putting them on the upper-high-side at the moment (although, to be honest, we’re still going on architects quotes). I couldn’t make head-nor-tail of the bloke who came around; first I thought he was completely negative, then he seemed a bit more positive; he kept saying “well, with no drawings it’s hard to give you an idea” which is irritating because we sent him the damn drawing. Yes, it’s a rough sketch plan, but frankly, we’re asking for a box with windows along one side and a Sedum roof. It’s not deeply complex.

Granted we’ve now moved the staircase from the left to the right, for the sake of simplicity and reducing costs, but other than that it’s pretty much as we sent it.

But mostly he spent the time explaining that we need structural drawings to meet building regs; which is true; but as I pointed out, we’d need different drawings if we get it done in high fly ash block to if we get it done in timber. Therefore we need ballpark figures to decide
1) can we afford it at all (probably not)
2) Is the ballpark timber estimate so far different from the ballpark block estimate that we have to pick on price.

And then we can pick, and then we certainly *do* want to get someone to do us proper structural drawings that can go off to building regs or the planners, if required. But until we know what we’re going to make it out of, at least in principle, and indeed whether we’re hopelessly optimistic even considering it (which I suspect we are), then we can’t really go any further.

The process is not, shall we say, filling me with joy at any rate.

Anyhow, so let’s run through the joys of the last week.

Nikki got the G-Wiz going, but we’ve found that the EMS on it is dead, or the loom, or somewhere in between. It isn’t working correctly, anyhow. And since I’m unwilling to spend more money on it, and the wee beastie’s being recalcitrant it’s now up for sale (anyone want a G-Wiz? It works-ish, but does need a new EMS). The batteries appear to be working well, though, which is good.

We got an offer for the Enfield, but with the G-Wiz dead I’m slightly inclined to hang on to the Enfield with the hope of fixing it. That’ll be new: Controller, Batteries, Wiring, Charger and a service for brakes and suspension/transmission components. Assuming the screen’s not delaminated any further it should be okay though.

I am a bit worried about the screen delaminating though. Given the way things have been going so far…

The tuner-string, who’s name escapes me, on the Bush Type 61 has snapped, which is irritating as working out the routing is a pig (thankfully, it’s the same model John has so we can copy it)…

And the Vision Plasma TV which we hoped was fixable, after an enormous struggle we (mostly John) managed to replace the module presumed to have failed (the infamous FMSD102A), sadly the set still does the awesome ‘click’ when you turn it on (as the relay clicks over) but doesn’t appear to do anything else. There is the possibility that the audio works (which the previous owner claimed) but without a remote it’s impossible to tell – and because the screen doesn’t work I can’t discern if the one-for-all remote is set to the right settings…

So that’s a bollocks.

On the plus side; Bull Motif, after some discussion have opted to replace the heated rear window in Rebecca. The only problem being that’s another 4 hours driving! If they’d have done this in the first place then it’d’ve been much easier, but I have to say that being direct and not actually asking for anything has, for once, worked. Having initially said ‘no’, they’ve discussed it with the manufacturer and decided to replace the screen. Which is good :)

So, when the builder said “I’ll individually price each bit out for you so you can see if there’s something you want to cut, and I’ll price up for Pavadentro and (some other, cheaper) insulation so you can pick” he may, in fact, have been talking out of his arse.

What he sent us in the end is a “spreadsheet” which is, actually, a list. A list with a single figure at the end (well, several figures making one moderately large price). I’m not entirely sure what good that does in terms of giving us an idea of what we should cut (clearly, most of the work, according to him).

Let’s hope the next quote is more useful.

Now, I know that despite these exciting internet enabled times in which we live, many of those among the building professions more have a website as a version of a fixed advert in the yellow pages than any kind of ongoing care about it thing, but why have an e-mail address if you’re just going to ignore it?

Also, I know that work that you actually have in your hand is much easier to concentrate on than potential future work, but if you don’t actually ever quote for potential future work, then eventually that work’s going to dry up. I’m given to understand, from the builders/plumbers/architects/etc that I’ve met that this year has not started particularly auspiciously, and that they all are in need of more work.

So why is it so damn difficult to wheedle any kind of quote out of these people? Really? Even just a ballpark figure so we know whether it’s worth continuing to get a fuller quote? Lots of companies seem to be willfully ignoring me, but then perhaps I’m just uncommonly bad at phrasing things or asking too much or providing too little information?

It’s hard to tell, the radio silence from them is often tedious.

We appear to have over 50 different sorts of tea/fruit/herbal infusion. I am considering the possibility we may have some kind of problem.

Also; the Mission 780se’s I found in Bristol are dead. This sucks as I thought I’d be listening to the dulcet tones of my record deck, and am instead still listening to the only music I have handy (best of bootie).

So, we’ve had our meeting with the architects today. And, actually, the electrician. Tomorrow’s the plumber.

And I’ve managed to drag myself up from feeling astonishingly negative. Which is funny, because the first architect seemed fairly positive. I don’t think we can do what we want at all, but he was positive about it. The next one gently broke it to us that he didn’t really think we could achieve it, at all, and suggested that we might be better off just ringing a builder and getting them around to slap a box on the back of the house – which is something we were trying to avoid.

However, I’ve found something positive – a garage that we can afford, although we may have to erect it ourselves, or tile it ourselves, or something. :-/

And if we can trim enough costs from the garage, then we might be able to achieve the ideal for the house within budget. Which’d be awesome… Although I think we might want to just get a builder to quote for it, or maybe get an architect to draw it and then let a builder ‘realise’ it… Meh. Dunno. It’s all complex in my head at the moment.

The saga of the mobile phone drags on, causing chaos and destruction around it. So I’m not willing, as I may have mentioned to have a fourth credit check before the mortgage is through, and then today when I went to get the phone line reconnected (it’s got a ‘Stop’ on it), well… the saga went like this:

– Call Be, they say BT need to reactivate the line.
– Ring BT, be informed (somewhat rudely) that Be ‘should be able to’ reactivate the line and that ‘any Broadband supplier could do it’, and that I should ring them back
– Call Be, they say they can’t reactivate it from it’s current state and that I should ring BT, or Post Office Telephones who can.
– Call BT who *won’t* reactivate a line without a 12 month contract
– Stare faintly at Virgin before realising we’d be paying nearly a third as much again (which’d give us TV as well, but we don’t watch much TV – and we could get a freeview box).
– Call the post office who say yes, we can have it and no long contract, but…

…it needs a credit check.

*sigh*

Adding insult to injury I don’t know if I’ve paid off my loan, and I don’t know this because online it shows 200 odd quid – I’m not sure if this is credit or debit, and the bank are confused and say they think it’s paid off…