Tag Archives: kitchen

Tuesday 1st February 2011 – The one big advantage …

 of having a hand-picked team is that it’s amazing just how quickly you can progress.

Terry has finished all of the grouting in the kitchen now and has done the wiring in the third bedroom and made good around the sockets. And when that was complete Liz washed down the ceiling and the walls while I sanded down all of the woodwork and patched some of the plastering that needed doing.

Meantime, back in the bathroom Terry has taken the radiator and the sink off the wall, removed the rest of the tiles that I couldn’t reach, and plastered the walls where the tiles used to be. And that bit wasn’t easy either. Whoever did the tiling in here when the place was new didn’t make it easy for anyone to follow.

But after all of that no wonder we are all exhausted. It’s flaming hard work all of this.

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Monday 31st January 2011 – For some unknown reason …

… that I haven’t quite worked out, I’m totally whacked this evening. And after our day of rest too. Mind you, day of rest, when we went off on a route march all across the parks of Jette (and there are a fair few of those) in a temperature of about minus 5 or something.

Today was better, a mere minus 2, and I had the morning off to go and be rude to an insurance company here in Brussels who are trying to charge me 3 months insurance for failing to renew Caliburn’s 2009 insurance. And a profitable morning it was as I managed to overturn a €390 or something demand into a mere €72.06.

While I was away Terry grouted the kitchen wall tiles (and what a good job he made of that – I have a beautiful kitchen here now) and Liz put the first coat of paint on the bathroom ceiling. This afternoon Terry and I disconnected the water (and that was an exciting project) so that Terry could finish off the de-tiling in the bathroom, and Liz and I worked in the third bedroom – me sanding down the window frame and the door and Liz trying her best to wash the ceiling and walls (and understanding now why I put polystyrene tiles on the ceiling and fibreglass wallpaper on the walls).

If Terry can finish the electrics in the third bedroom Liz and I can make a good start in there tomorrow. There’s a lot of work to be done in there.

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Wednesday 26th January 2011 – So what did we do today then?

Another not-so-early morning and breakfast, and then Terry did some plastering underneath the kitchen window where the old tiles had been. I had to go to the bank and so I took Liz and showed her where the shops are. We also met one of my neighbours and her daughter and stopped for a good chat. She is thinking about having some tiling done sometime soon and so she’ll be coming round to weigh up Terry’s attributes.

Liz has carried on with painting the WC and I’ve been tidying up the 3rd bedroom, emptying the cupboard under the stairs and taking the tiles off the wall in the bathroom. I’ve been able to take of quite a few in one piece and these I will be using in the Auvergne in what will be my washroom. Waste not, want not.

We hit a little snag though. In the kitchen some of the wiring to the bathroom needs to be buried underneath the tiling and it’s not connected up. And furthermore, it’s not so easy to see how it should be connected up. So that used up a few hours of work, trying to sort that lot out.

Tomorrow it’s shopping again. We need to find some tiles for the bathroom and for the balcony, and I have a couple more bills to pay.

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Monday 24th January 2011 – It’s a shame about the forest.

And I should know. I served on 5 Open University Students Association committees (OUSA Belgium, NERF, the SRG, the Region 9 Regional Committee and the OUSA EC) for about 3 years and I have just thrown all my papers away. And it took three huge Royal Mail sacks to take it all down to the skip here. Heaven knows how many trees that represents but if you calculate the number of people who actually serve on these committees it must be at least something the equivalent of the New Forest.

Yes, the European Paper Mountain indeed.

But at least I can get into my office now which is just as well, for that’s where I’ve been sleeping and so I’ll have room to spread out tonight.

We also have an electric oven and grill. Terry helped me fight my way into the garage that I rent downstairs and we pulled out the fitted oven that I bought a few years ago in a sale. A slightly shopsoiled display unit it was and so reduced from £769 to £307 and so in keeping with my idea of going for quality at a reduced price rather than full-price rubbish, I bought it and stored it in the garage until I was ready for it.

It seems too that the rewiring that I did in the kitchen was rather … errr ….unorthodox and with Terry being a fully-qualified time-served electrician he put that right in no time at all – well, geologically speaking that is.

The cleaning and throwing away of stuff is also continuing and at this rate we’ll have a place to sit down by the weekend.

I’m hoping that we can have the place finished off in a couple of weeks so that I can sell it and have another weight off my shoulders but in a certain respect I shall be sorry to leave here permanently even though it’s been almost four years since I paid it any more than a flying visit.

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Saturday 16th January 2010 – I dunno where this morning went.

The alarm went off as usual and I lay semi-somnolent in bed for a while waiting for the second call. And it became apparent that I wasn’t going to get a second call – when I looked at the clock closely it was 09:54. I must have slept through the first call and heard the second one.

But that wasn’t the best of it. Something had clearly happened through the night such as the clock switching itself off and back on. And it’s a radio-controlled clock so it sets its own time but for some reason its time zone is set to GMT-2 so it was in actual fact 10:54.

So I steam-cleaned part of the kitchen (and it needed it) and then went off to Commentry for shopping. There was absolutely nothing of interest although I did create some mild amusement in one of the shops. The cashier gave my €20 note a thorough inspection before accepting it, so I couldn’t resist the temptation.
“It is ok?” I asked
“yes, it’s fine” she replied.
“Good. I’ll make some more like that tonight“.
But as Alfred Hitchcock once said to Kenneth Williams, “it’s a total waste of time telling jokes to foreigners!”

After that it was off to Neris and the swimming baths. And don’t know why I bothered. They’ve had a price increase and it’s now €3:00 to go in. Water at 30 degrees and the interior at 17 degrees. They should have specified that it was fahrenheit and not centigrade though – I froze in there.

And now I’m clean I’ll change the bedding and my nightie tonight. Yes, I change my sheets and pillowcases once a year – whether they need it or not.

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Tuesday 5th January 2010 – All this fuss and hype …

… about minus 11 – when I went downstairs at 21:30 to cook tea it was only minus 5. Mind you it was minus 3 in the verandah and freezing point in the lean-to where I eat, so I didn’t hang about long. A handful or two of pasta and a tin of beans and that was tea. And then back up here in the relative warmth.

Mind you, I say relative warmth because when I came up here after work it was a balmy 3.4 degrees in here. Having a foot of snow on the windows hasn’t helped. That of course meant that I’ve been up on the roof a few times today clearing snow off the panels – but still it keeps me fit.

I started off the morning working on my plans for the kitchen and how I’m going to fit the stairs in properly overhead – and I have a few ideas on this. But I couldn’t get into the swing of it what with the cold and so I ended up cutting pillars for upstairs and trying to finish off the studding for the bedroom wall. I’ve one more vertical fitted and another one almost cut and ready but the battery went flat in the drill that I use for marking the lets in the beams, there wasn’t another battery charged, it was getting dark and I was cold and so at 17:10 I called it a day.

One thing about all of this snow is that I get to wash in warm water after work. I just love the fresh snow and so I collect a saucepan full and warm it up so that it melts and I wash in that. It’s the freshest water you can have. So after a warm wash I came up here and … er… crashed out.

In other news, one of the things that I go on about on a regular basis is “Dig For Victory”. During World War II when the UK was threatened with starvation during the U-boat menace all kinds of open areas were turned over to vegetable plots in the “Dig For Victory” campaign so that more food should be grown to ease the risk of starvation. My contention has been that seeing as the west is now fighting an oil war, then everyone should be “Digging For Victory” by growing oil crops to ease the dependency on fossil-fuel oils. Anyway the UK Government hasn’t quite caught up with me yet but it has launched its own “Dig For Victory” campaign. It’s even proposing cookery lessons, so all we need now is for Vera Lynn to sing “Whale Meat Again” and it’ll be just like old times.

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Monday 4th January 2010 – BRRRRRRRR!

The weather has broken here today. I woke up this morning to discover about 3 inches of snow and a temperature of minus 0.5. So first job before breakfast wa to climb up on the roof and clear the solar panels. We were promised a day of scattered cloud (which also means intermittent sunshine) but apart from a patch of blue that I noticed out of the corner of my eye while I was cleaning off the panels, it was just miserable, grey and depressing.

And cold too. The temperature continued to drop throughout the day and it’s currently (or it was an hour ago) minus 4.2 degrees. It’ll warm up slightly tomorrow and then collapse down to minus double figures.

I’ve been working on the area under the stairs today and I reckon I’m going to go with this idea about having the kitchen in the living room. As you know I’m planning to capture my rainwater in a subterranean tank but in order to do this if I put the kitchen in the lean-to as originally planned, I’m dependent upon the local council selling me a piece of ground. If I put the kitchen the other side of the house – i.e. under the stairs, the tank can go next to the lean-to on that side – on my own land. Furthermore, I can put the big freezer that I have in Brussels (I have a centrally-heated apartment standing empty in Brussels you know, and here I am struggling along in sub-zero temperatures! It says a lot for Brussels that I’d rather freeze to death here) in the lean-to on that side of the house and it will be right next to the kitchen.

So what will I do with the lean-to in which I lived for 2 years and in which I planned to install the kitchen? well, I reckon that will make an ideal place for the office. It’ll be on the ground floor with access via the verandah which means that people don’t have to trail all the way around the house and up the stairs to get to it, and also it’ll be close to the living accommodation and coffee-making appliances.

And so what will I do with the attic that I was planning to use as the office? I could turn that into a guest bedroom or something – not that I have guests but then you never know.

The good idea about having plans is so that you can divert from them and go off and do things that are totally different. And the way my house is starting to take shape, I have no idea at all how it will end up. And that’s what I find so exciting.

And in other news, remember me talking about Yemen the other day? Well, the west is starting to up the ante. Remember – you heard it hear first. And in other other news, the body-scanners are on their way. I told you that too, didn’t I? The entire news output of the western world is becoming more and more predictable. I’m getting sick of it, I tell you. It’s not the world that I ever voted for. The problem is though that the UK and the USA have so alienated the rest of the world that things have gone too far for the clock to be turned back. And with a population of about 450 million, it’s not a lot to take on an entire culture consisting of a couple of billion souls – especially when “the others” are much more committed to the cause than anyone in the UK or the USA – imagine trying to drag one of them from in front of the TV to confront an invading army. Of course, forget all about Kamikaze bombers and the like as being something from an alien culture. Churchill was planning to exhort the British population to launch suicide attacks against German soldiers if the invasion had taken place and had already prepared the slogan “you can always take one with you”. That kind of leadership wouldn’t work today – most Brits wouldn’t care who was in charge as long as they still had 500 channels on the TV and 24-hour drinking.

You know, I’m not sure how all of this is going to end as the Bushbaby’s crusade simply isn’t sustainable in the long-term. Even when the mighty USA was confronting Asian peasants armed with World-War II-era surplus weapons in South-East Asia they couldn’t keep it up. And the Russians were defeated by logistics in Afghanistan. What will happen when the steam runs out of the western offensive, which it surely will?

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Saturday 2nd January 2010 – Well…

…I’ve finally had the day that I have been waiting for – a long cold Arctic sunny day. There were still plenty of clouds around but I managed 135 amp-hours of electricity in the house and 37.4 in the barn. That figure for the house – it’s the highest since 20th November and it’s cheered me up a little.

So this morning I had a really good clean and tidy up. I threw out tons of stuff and there’s another huge pile for burning. I may well do that tomorrow and cook some potatoes while I’m at it, to eat tomorrow night with the pizza. I’ve found some more pine shelving and I took that upstairs and now that’s all full of folders documents and magazines. The place looks pretty impressive and that’s just as well for Terry and Liz came round this evening. And that reminds me – I must fix up a proper doorbell now that I’m more likely to have visitors. I can’t have my guests banging on the door for ages while I have the music going full-tilt.

This afternoon I went into Pionsat to swap a bottle of gas at the garage. I like to support local commerces if it’s just for this kind of thing. It’s cheaper than going to St Eloy even if the gas is cheaper there – 10kms instead of 35 and much less chance of being sidetracked by LIDL. But despite the garage having a notice saying “Ferme les dimanche ainsi que les jours feries” it was closed, despite it being neither a Sunday nor a Public Holiday. I don’t know what’s the matter with these places in Pionsat – they don’t want to earn any money and I had to go to St Eloy instead. Yes, the long-range weather forecast warns us of MINUS 13 on Tuesday night, MINUS 14 on Thursday night and MINUS 6 during Friday DAYTIME. I don’t want to be stuck without heating in these conditions.

And I’m having serious second thoughts about my kitchen. I have to bring the water pipe all the way across the house to the far corner of the attic and then drop the water down below to the bathroom but run a hot water pipe right the way back across the house to the lean-to where I’ll be putting the kitchen. Meanwhile directly under the stairs on the ground floor and right underneath the bathroom will be a load of dead space. And today I’ve been thinking about putting an open kitchen there. It’ll narrow the room quite a bit (from 5.2 metres to about 3.6) and the kitchen will be quite small but then again I’m not using half of this attic and there is only me to think about. It’ll make the plumbing so much easier too.

What do you think? All comments hints and suggestions are welcome.

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