Tag: kitchen

— weekend 19/21 March 2011 —

The last few days have involved first fix electrics, covering absolutely every bloody thing in Yet More Dust, after I’d cleaned it all up. We went to Ikea while they were here, and bought a kitchen sink (which we now don’t like) and various bits and pieces such as a new rug for the dining room, and so forth. Got home to find total chaos, and they had discovered dry rot in the kitchen floor. Aargh.

Got someone in to have a look on Friday morning, who quoted us £850 to fix. Got someone else in on Saturday morning, who quoted £995. Both of them said they could do it this week, but the dearer chap phoned back on Sunday assuming we wanted him to carry out the work, only to be told that we could find no trace of him on Google*, he turned up in a plain van, had no business card, and we weren’t about to hand over a grand to someone with no public presence.

On Saturday we took the rubble to the tip, where we picked up a load of wood for the stove from someone who was about to dump it (hurrah), went to Asda (which was manic), then home via Anlaby to visit the inestimable Fields. We bought pasties (no longer Cornish), three sorts of sossidges for the freezer, a hand made Shepherd’s Pie and some pork stuffed with basil and ricotta (I’ve got no kitchen, OK?), and some cat bikkit that the Tribe particularly like from the pet shop up there – haven’t seen it anywhere else.

I spotted an ad in the local freesheet for a cats/kittens Open Day for Beverley CPL, admission cat food, so we bundled up the tins of Breeder food from Makro that the Tribe liked until we bought lots of it (sigh), and took that over to Woodmansey. We hardly saw any kittins, but no matter – the fud has gone to a good cause.

Then we drove over to Paull and walked a couple of miles along the foreshore; it was a beautiful day, and hardly anyone about, and we really enjoyed it. Then we went and had a Sunday roast in the Crown Inn in Paull, which was very nice. Home via B&Q, where we bought Danish oil for the worktops, and some spotlights to be wired into the external light point, and some spare bulbs for the lamp beside my end of the sofa in the living room, which turned out to have been unplugged …

The plumber came to do his first fix this morning – he very kindly rearranged everything so that he could run his pipes under the floor before DryRotMan did his stuff. Which he is now saying he might not be able to to until Saturday, which means messing the plasterer about again. However, we now have no water downstairs apart from the outside tap, so we have to wash up in the bath. I am never, ever doing this again.

It’ll be lovely when it’s finished.

*Not strictly true – there were two or three ads on Loot, none of which were for timber treatment.

on yer 'ead

as those of you who have visited Ramtops’ Repose will know, we have a dutch airer device suspended in the kitchen, from which we hang kitchen paraphenalia such as colanders and spoons and so forth. It also supports a two tier wire hanging basket, which is our onion repository.

at least, it did – until last night when, as I was trying to remove a shallot from its upper tier, the bloody basket fell off and, pausing only to smite me on my head, deposited its oniony contents all over the worktop, and knocking over the bowl for Stuff destined for Modo, the compost heap, thus adding used tealeaves and so forth to the mess.

I gave an almighty shriek, probably bloodcurdling – from shock, more than anything – and perlmonger rushed downstairs to see what horrors a cat had perpetrated, because that’s what normally causes shrieks in this household. Although now I come to think of it, I bet SomeCat had somehow caused it.

later on, we watched Ray, which was better than I thought it would be; in fact, it was very fine indeed. Recommended.

when it was over, I found myself with one particular song from it running through my head – You Don’t Know Me. But it wasn’t his version … It took a while to identify it, but eventually I sussed that it was Meryl Streep, from Postcards From the Edge, another very fine film which I must watch again shortly.