Devon Downsizing Dash

Made a quick foray from N Wales to Devon this week for an overnight stay with parents-in-law, who moved on Monday from a 5-bedroomed house to a 2-bedroomed bungalow on the edge of Dartmoor.  This is downsizing on a grand scale, and various family members have been helping with packing and re-homing items of furniture over recent weeks.  I volunteered to arrive on the evening of the actual move to do some of the multitude of jobs which always arise in the immediate aftermath.

I'd been tipped off about the need for shelves in the utility room and bedroom, an extra rail in a wardrobe, a sticky handle assembly on the garage door, and the need for some safety rails around the property.  I always find the business of loading the necessary tools and bits and pieces into the car to be a tense (and time-consuming) affair - difficult to remember/imagine every item you're going to need in a day's work.

At last the car was packed and, rattling a bit, I headed off on my 6-hours drive, fortunately able to take a break near Crewe to visit an old school friend who, coincidentally, is also preparing for a move to smaller accommodation and kindly offering lots of his old books to school. Given the state of the car, I had to make alternative arrangements for the actual removal of the books, but we enjoyed looking through them.

The following morning the jobs started before full light and went on through to dusk.  Numerous holes were drilled, plugged and screwed, fittings were lubricated, many items fixed to walls.  The up-and-over garage door was a bit of a problem. It turned out that the handle assembly was broken, but in any event offered hardly enough grip to allow the locking mechanism to be turned.  In the end, I fixed a mole wrench onto the spindle to provide additional leverage.  Not an aesthetically pleasing solution but, for the time being, one which works.  And luckily I have more than one mole wrench 'in stock', so it was no great hardship to leave one behind when everything else went back in the car.

As darkness fell I said my farewells and headed north.  By good fortune, I was able to break my journey north near Kidderminster to pick up a significant load of recycled cast iron guttering bought the previous week on Ebay.  It will all need stripping and re-painting before it can be fitted to our cottage and outbuildings to continue my program of replacing the plastic rain water goods wrongheadedly installed here over the years.  So ...  some stock items were left in Devon (I almost ran out of the rawlplugs I'd seen fit to take) but new ones came home with me as I arrived just before midnight.  Glad to see my bed!

How many miles do you drive?

I realise that these days it's politically very incorrect to celebrate any kind of driving milestone, but I took guilty pleasure this afternoon from seeing the odometer on our Subaru reach 100K. Just a number, I know, but an elegant one.

We have had the Subaru since shortly after we came to live in N Wales, as you can hardly expect your neighbours to be sympathetic to your being snowed-in up your hill unless you have some form of 4WD vehicle.  We chose the Forester in spite of its modest fuel efficiency, hoping that it would be a comfortable workhorse.  And so it has proved, and after a first year of gearbox and alternator problems which cost a great deal to put right, it has been extemely reliable and has cost little more than routine servicing, expertly carried out at Prosport in Stockport.  It had 25,500 miles on the clock when we bought it, so we've averaged 12.5K a year.  It's now ten years old.  Over roughly the same period (and please bear in mind that from late 2005 until mid-2010 I was commuting daily to Manchester and - before he came to live with us a year ago - regularly visiting my father in Rochdale) we put 135K miles onto a diesel-engined Golf which we traded in last summer for a newer model.

So it's easy to see where a big chunk of our disposable income has gone during this time.  Since I took early semi-retirement I've been doing a lot less mileage, and I don't think that use of my motorcycle really counts at all, though its engine is of a size to use more fuel per mile than our Golf.  It does 3-4K per annum.

For many years L and I had a succession of comfortable Saabs - again not very fuel-efficient but well-used and well-maintained and therefore not an environmental disaster?  All these things are relative, I guess.  I started my motoring career 45 years ago with a 150cc Lambretta scooter, and then a 948cc 1965-built Mini Clubman. I still enjoy driving and have always believed in working vehicles hard, carrying passengers and goods, using roof-racks, pulling trailers.  I treasure the independence that being a driver and rider has given me.  My future vehicles probably won't see 100K - and the environment will breathe a sigh of relief.

Is driving for you a pleasure or a necessary evil?

Car maintenance

But not the full 12,000 mile service kind of maintenance - just the sort of tweaks to our children's cars which always seem to need doing during their visits - and this Christmas, happily, all 4 and partners have been here.

Odd one out this time was younger daughter's car - she almost always cadges some screenwash, but must have forgotten this time.  Biggest job was on younger son's Golf, as he relieved me of a set of steel wheels and winter tyres which had fitted our Mk5 hatchback last year but resolutely refused to go on our Mk6 estate this year (bigger front brake calipers). This means his summer wheels are stacked in our workshop now.

Easiest job was a new headlamp bulb on older son's Fiat Idea - a car I never much like the idea of working on - starkly contrasting with the grief of fitting similar item to older daughter's Ford Focus.  Her husband and I seriously considered taking the battery out to get access to the holding clip after the best part of an hour's fiddling and knuckle-skinning, but then he somehow managed to get the thing back in place.  Odd how some car manufacturers make it so difficult to do these basic jobs - we heard from a friend of the same kind of problem on a Toyota Avensis.

Is it that the car manufacturers are trying to protect their dealers' workshops and are against us keeping such items in stock ourselves?

Christmas tree

Four years ago (or was it 5?) we planted 5 tiny Nordman fir trees in the field behind the cottage with a view to providing family members with Christmas trees some time in the future.  They have had a hard life, as soil conditions are thin and dry, and don't enjoy being driven over by our kindly neighbour's tractor each year when he comes to flail our hedge. 

Four now survive, and this week we decided that one was large enough to be our festive tree in the house.  Trying to dig it up with roots intact was not the work of a moment, as it had a sizeable tap-root, but eventually it was in a pot.

Fortunately we had a couple of strong men available to carry the earth-filled pot up to the house, where sundry skilled decorators set to work with our box of decorations, many going back 30 years to when the said decorators made them at playgroup.  The adult decorators were assisted by younger grandson, aged 2, so continuity is assured.

Time will tell whether the tree can be successfully re-planted to grow on.  In the meantime, a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

Privacy without blinds or curtains

Five years ago, just 12 months or so after we moved to North Wales, we had our bathroom completely re-fitted, and waved goodbye to the dark blue suite and leaking shower, as well as the cork-tiled walls that had been all the rage in the early 80s when the room last received attention.  Just about the only thing we enjoyed about the original bathroom was the view from the window over our side garden and bird feeders, so we decided not to have obscure glass fitted.  I found a supplier of vinyl film and chose a striped design so that we would be able to see through the gaps.  The closer you are to the window, the better this works.

However, for some reason or other, the roll sat in a corner of our bedroom for 5 years or so - a splendid example of a stock item.  It was only when we recently had the outside of the house painted and limewashed, and had to have a kitchen window frame replaced (wooden and single-glazed because of the Listed Buildings Regulations) that we found ourselves ordering secondary double glazing.  This was the ideal answer for the bathroom, too, because by fitting the film on the secondary glazing, we can plan to take out the sliding panes in the summer when the views are best and the foliage on the trees will prevent us from traumatising our neighbours as we take a shower.

Installation was a mite tricky - perhaps it would have been less so if the film had been fresh.  After all, it relies on some fairly high-tech adhesives.  You float the cut film onto the glass on a solution of soapy water, and then strip the backing paper off.  Sounds easy, but I did have a bit of a wrestle.  However, it worked in the end and we can now look forward to family visitors over Christmas being less self-conscious about their showers than for the last five years.

After an interlude

Quite unreasonably had to spend a few days this week pursuing paid employment, but it was good yesterday to get back to jobs around the house and get my hands (and many other bits) dirty again.

Incidentally, many thanks to son-in-law for offering to try to smuggle this item from Oxford for me:

Fortunately (as his wife and son can't afford to have him arrested) my visit to London this week produced this fine pair, who have promised to try to breed and produce a baby for me early next year:

In the high wind and rain yesterday, I set about switching the wheels on the Golf for the steels-with-winter-tyres bought last year when we had the Mk5.  Very frustratingly, having fitted the rears, I discovered that the Mk6 front brake calipers are too big for the 15" steel wheels, so it was change back again, wash off the brake dust and put everything away.  A couple of hours wasted - or put down to experience?  I decided to look on the bright side, literally, and spent most of the rest of the day fitting an external power point to the bakehouse and rigging our fifth set of Christmas lights.  That job went well, but the flickering outside our bedroom window overnight indicates that I need to re-visit the electronic timer.

Kitchen (scullery) opening

So, the tiling is done, the grouting is done, the sealant is round the sink unit and the secondary double glazing is in place.  After a 5-months project, our 'back kitchen' or 'scullery' is officially open.  It's not the cooking part of the kitchen, but it houses the freezer and dishwasher, provides loads of storage, and gives us a long run of worktop which should make preparation work positively enjoyable.

This is what part of it looked like when I started:

One of the late purchases was the waterproof grout.  In spite of the fact that the pack promised enough grout for 300 tiles (and I had used 162) I only just had enough for the job - such a close thing, in fact, that there is none to put into stock.  This got me thinking about the business of estimating for jobs.  I think I have got better at this over the years, but I do still have a tendency to over-order (hence the stock items!)  This is partly because it's such a pain to be held up on a job if you run out of something, and partly because the cost of a job has to be assessed in terms of time as well as materials.  What I can't manage to do, however, is take the professional's hard-headed attitude to the bits left over and treat them as trade waste - even, these days, having to pay to dispose of them at the tip.  No wonder our children count on there being available cuphooks, shelves, windscreen wiper blades, etc, etc, for them to dip into in the workshop.  Just fine as long as they don't need any grout.