Friday, 3 December 2010

The art of the bodge

The work on the bathroom has started, so the night before last we had gaps of several inches around the new window, during the worst weather of the decade (for Sarth Landan).  Even the Millwall fans were wearing shirts that night.  The toilet is out, the sink is out, the partition wall that separated the toilet is out and it’s full of rubble and dust.  Perfect for a candlelit scented bath.

The loft is now fully insulated, and the boarding half done.
The front door has been transformed. 


It had been knocked in several times (I suspect by the police in order to investigate whether they had a sauna or a Greenhouse in the basement, see earlier editions re indoor cannabis cultivation), and eventually they gave up patching it and just put a piece of hardboard over it.  I had to drill through that to make a letter box.  There were gaps between the frame and the wall, now foam filled and covered by beading.  All the dents made by the sledgehammer had to be filled, as did all the holes in the refurbished door we bought, and all sanded, and all the paint scraped off the frosted glass (a nightmare).
The banister spindles were all wonky, ... rather than cut them to size the installer had lent them at an angle to fit!  And, rather like the chimes on my icecream van* (see below), they'd selected various different styles and put them in as they came to hand.  We have tried to standardise ..

These made a great noise when I knocked them over

The Kitchen/utility is being decorated, so we may have somewhere to sit and eat soon.
On the other hand ....  We’ve booked some places in Europe in January now, so it feels like the trip start date is getting closer. We’ve got a place in Brittany on the 8th of Jan for 1 week, then 3 in the Dordogne, then 2 weeks in Sicily (with a few days scheduled in to drive there) then 2 weeks on mainland Italy, Calabria, after that we’ll play it by ear.

* Icecream van reference above ..   I had a holiday job driving an icecream van in Middlesbrough back in the 70s.  The guy who ran the scheme was called Alf Diccico, Italian/Glaswegian, Chris Rea's Godfather and I could write a book about him.  From the information above you may have a mental picture of him as something akin to Don Corleoni, but this wouldn't be entirely accurate.  His business involved running 6 icecream vans, old Bedfords, all unreliable.  As an example, the brakes on my van locked on occasion, this meant the van came to an unexpected and abrupt halt, much to the consternation of drivers behind it.  Unfortunately, the contents of the van were subject to their own momentum, so the abrupt halt was normally proceeded by the icecream cones hitting the windshield, followed by the chocolate flake boxes, followed by a grinding noise as the fridge started it's stately journey towards the front of the vehicle.  I once got pinned by the fridge to the steering wheel and had to drive back to the depot in order to get released.  This was not as bad as driving back to the depot after the gear stick came off in my hand.  In order to ensure availability of his main assetts (that would be the vans not the drivers) he bought a seventh van from the scrappy which he used to cannibalise parts from for the other vans.  In my case the teeth in the little chimes had rusted off so the mechanic (who evidently was no music lover) selected teeth from the 7th van and attached them randomly.  When I appeared on a road and put my chimes on, mothers used to take their children in and close all the doors and windows (this was only on the occasions they could hear them over the sound of the broken exhaust).

In case you are concerned about my apparent laxity with the need to be operating within the appropriate health and safety regulations, fear not, I quickly learnt to jump out of the van whilst the fridge was "in transit".  The downside was that this soured even further my relationship with the irate drivers who had narrowly avoided running into the back of me, so frequently no sooner was I outside the van that it became imperative to get back inside the van.  If, subsequently, the van wouldn't start it was usually because the starter motor "dogs" had got stuck in the engaged position.  To release them was simple and intuitive, the starter motor was accessible from the drivers seat by removal of a panel below the dashboard, and a few violent blows with the wheel brace normally did the trick.  Why I was never arrested remains a mystery.

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