So Olly and I decided we were going to finally take the plunge….. As we both work full time, tend to travel a lot and live in a flat we can’t really have pets So Olly and I decided to invest in a plant each.  The idea being that if we could look after a plant successfully, maybe we could progress to a living thing of the animal variety (a piggy)! So we each chose our plants. Olly: a Bonsai tree.  More specifically the growing-in-the-rock type – a tree that represents the struggle to survive…. and Me: I bought a Venus Fly trap! I was wondering how the plants refelct our personalities… the Bonsai requires lots of meticulous preening whilst the Venus Fly trap is just a wild carnivore!  I’m so impressed – my plant is still alive and has caught a fly, i also saw it snap shut one of its traps yeaterday.  I’m hoping it will continue to grow [I'm thinking little shop of horrors style here!].

So after the trauma of the last “incident” where we suspected an EDS air con Ltd van ran into our garage, damaging the door and the uPVC facias (less than 7 months old!)….Olly spoke to the residesnts that own the van. They told us that the driver was no longer with them and the van would not be parked there any more. What a load of bollox! Guess what i saw parked in front of our garage less than 1 minute ago….yes the exact same van, parked in its usual spot , in front of my now damaged garage.

Luckily for me, the resident that owns the van was out in the road, happily twittering with other neighbours in front of her house, were there is a pick up truck and two other cars parked. I told her in front of everyone that the van had to be removed from in front of my garage, as last time the driver caused a lot of damage (which surprise surprise – they won’t claim on their business insurance if they have any!). I also informed her that it was residents parking four our courtyard, and that the freeholder was putting up signs shortly. I have now been pro-active and found a sign making company to produce the parking signs. I have also chatted to other residents in the courtyard who are happy for signs to go up on their property, providing we consult them as to the exact locations. I swear to god, as soon as those signs go up, if that van parks there i am going to phone the police and council straight away!

People complain about having problems with travellers/gypsies parking on their land – we just have a chavy irritating resident outside of the courtyard, using the courtyard parking spaces, damaging our garages and damaging the tarmac courtyard residents will need to pay to replace! I really have to wonder why people are so selfish. I am contemplating parking my car in the annoying neighbours driveway – in front of their garage….perhaps that will make my point clearer?

So last week we left our house to go to work when I noticed our garage door looked a little odd, on closer inspection I realised it had been crashed into.

Someone had hit the door and bent it, and broken the nice PVC bit at the top. Very annoying given that it wasn’t that long ago that we had the whole garage redone.

Given that the PVC bit that was broken is very high up, the two broken bits at the top are the same distance apart as the uprights on a typical ladder, and the bend in the door is a vertical bend from top to bottom, it is fair to say that it must have been a van that did it.

Now as it happens a van parks illegally outside our garage every day and guess what; it has a big ladder on top that matches EXACTLY the broken bits. The company that owns the van is EDS Aircon Ltd (clearly an irresponsible company if they don’t care about hit and runs). So after a bit of digging I found out where the van owner lives and wouldn’t you know it, he is not at all forthcoming about the whole issue.

So after a few hours a hammering the door back to a normal shape it at least opens, but I am left waiting for a reference number from the police and an insurance claim to deal with.

So I have spent the best part of the last three days in one of our kitchen cupboards. I kid you not, you see when the builders put our kitchen in they took the covers off two vents and installed a cupboard in front of it, the upshot being freezing coldness in the kitchen. So to fix it all I had to do was to pop the back out of the cupboard, squirt some builders’ foam into the holes and put the back back in. Pfff why can’t life be as simple as Becca?

First up; the back of the cupboard fits EXACTLY in, so it can’t pop out, and there are wires behind, so I can’t jigsaw it. I ended up spending about three hours carefully breaking the back off enough so I could see where the wires were. THEN I went at it with a jigsaw, which is the scareiest powertool I have EVER used.

Then to fill the holes; well builders’ foam seemed the way to go, that stuff is wierd. It expands to twice its size overnight and it sets from the outside in. So when I went to cut it down to size the next day I ruptured the wet stuff inside and it slowly oozed out making lots of farting noises, it really was one of the strangest things I have ever seen.

Then to putting the back back, well the old one was distroyed in the great battle of jigsaw, so I had to fashion a new one. And to cheat to put it back I braced it with lots of long screws behind it.

All in all it was a pretty professional bodge up I think.

I also put a fancy pants new shower curtain up (that took me about a day too) which is so solid that it is probably considered load bearing now Now just the kitchen flooring to see to.

So K-day arived and our kitchen started to invade our house. We are one day in to the fitting proess and we already have a catalogue of errors to report So where to start, at the very beginning I suppose;

• Forgotten splash back – They completely forgot the stainless steel splash back, so Becca spent a long while on the phone getting them to sort it, in the end it took a several of attempts to sort it, and so the splash back had to be express deliveryed.
• Early delivery – Despite giving an 8 hour delivery window starting at midday they decided to deliver the tiles at 8:30, telling us they would come back later to give us the rest.
• Scratched splash back – The splash back turned up out of the blue with no warning from the delivery people after the origional delivery, we were of course at work, so they left it with a neighbour. On closer inspection it looked like it had been dragged across a concrete floor for several miles, the box was knackered and the steel very scratched. No chance of a new one being sent until June.
• Bent sink – The fitters turned up this morning and found the sink was as bent as a banana.
• Much longer fitting time – We were told it would take three days to do the whole thing, the first thing the fitters said was it would take over a week.
• Forgotten larder bit – Having made a lot of progress today the builder left this evening, when Becca saw the larder he had fitted we realised that he had put shelves in it instead of the magic pull out draw thing it is supposed to have.

And so that brings us to the end of day one, we have one partially fitted kitchen and a draft complaint letter. It currently looks like the timetable for completion is:
Units fitted by Friday,
Tiling done next week,
Splash back delivered and fitted in a couple of weeks,
Larder unit delivered and fitted sometime in the distant future.

Yes, that is, 3 days to over a month to fit our kitchen The moral of this story is to never ever ever get anything from B&Q.

We bought our dishwasher yesterday! Well rather Tesco bought our dishwasher for us, a year of collecting clubcard points and down to MFI we went. It’s going to take a month to be delivered, and then I guess it’s going to sit in the box for a month or two until our kitchen gets delivered, or I could try to do a bit of creative plumbing…………

Last week (Thursday I think) we bought our new kitchen! We had a couple of hours to spare before popping into London so we went to B&Q and bought the kitchen we were planning on getting. It’s going to look very pretty, it has doors, a worktop and some other stuff (spot who was paying attention when Becca was picking stuff). It’s gonna take months to get done though Probably mid-June by the time they get round to doing it.

My list of things to do has had an entry of ’sync network’ for a while, well today I finally got around to looking at this. If the program I found to do this is as good as it claims then I am very happy. It’s called foldershare, and it claims to be able to do many things, one of which is sync specified folders. You install a small piece of software on each thing you want to sync and log into your web-based account, from here you tell it you want to sync whatever you want. It’s currently syncing my music on my laptop and study computer.

The reason why I’m bothering with this is that both Bint and I use the study and laptop at various times and we have a lot of data that we really don’t want to lose. The hope is that I can set up both these computers to sync with the media pc we have in the living room, thus saving all my pictures, web site stuff, music etc etc etc. Microsoft bought the company last year (thus admitting they couldn’t figure out how to do it!) so I think it should be relatively ok to use.

Also, today I have installed a TV areial in the study so I can watch TV at the same time as Bint and I finally put the trim around Cats window.

So now that the roof has been done, we figured that we should paint the door. So we picked red, bright red, and painted it today. I use the word ‘painted’ in the loosest possible terms. We used brushes and paint, but we may as well have just thrown the paint at the door! It has dripped down, there patches we missed, the edges haven’t been done, and there is paint all over frame. So we are going to have to put a second coat on, but we are going to have to sand it down a bit first, sigh. So that’s next weekends DIY planned.

As for the extractor fan, well that’s all up and running, some clever wiring and upgrading of stuff meant that it wasn’t too traumatic to install. Now it’s just a question of setting it up so the humidity sensor actually does it’s job properly.

So we went and bought a fancy extractor fan today, it has a humidity sensor in it! So I started to put it in. I made a huge mess in the bathroom but it’s up now and connected to the roof vent. Just need to wire it in. Maybe it will smell less when I go in the bathroom after bint