Frog hops to it

After last week's disappointment, masking-tape-wise, I bit the bullet yesterday and went into repair mode, sticking short lengths of Frog Tape on the newly-painted walls under the damaged sections of ceiling, applying daubs of white emulsion, and pulling the tape off immediately to avoid it becoming too well stuck.

A single circumnavigation of the kitchen proved 100% successful this time, and there's now a crisp even line between walls and ceiling with no gaps or tears. Phew. At one point I had visions of getting into a kind of painting loop. Masking the ceiling and painting the walls and then masking the walls and painting the ceiling and then repeat from #1. It didn't happen, I'm relieved to say.

Now we have to settle in for a long wait before the new floor is fitted. Everything was going according to plan until this week. The floor fitter became nervous that the kitchen fitter hadn't confirmed his dates, and so pushed us back a week to avoid having nothing booked in next week. When the kitchen fitter did eventually come up with a date (w/c Sep 12) this strategy was proved right, as this was a week later than we were expecting. Anyway a deathly hush of no progress has now fallen on the kitchen until a week Monday.

Adding a remix to the mix

These weeks between kitchen construction phases, and especially between painting phases where we wait (almost) patiently for the last coat to dry well enough to hold masking tape without causing more damage, are beginning to drag a bit, but it doesn't mean we've been idle.

I can't believe it was (*checks*) last July (!) when we began the process of re-recording and remastering our first album Suburban Nostalgia, but it really has taken this long to find enough spare Thursday evenings to record the ten tracks over again with the key changes, vocal warm-up routines, and additional harmonies, and for Annie to lay down the new backing tracks, add new instruments, and generally spiff it all up.

Having only formally released one album (our second) for digital distribution way back in March last year, I had to refresh my memory of the process, but I'm happy to report that it all came back to me eventually, and I soon had the song files and the (slightly amended) album artwork uploading to the distributor.

The new tracks are already available for streaming from our website, so you can hear the difference right now. Official release of the remixed version of Suburban Nostalgia to iTunes and other online retailers will follow shortly as soon as the distributors have done their thing with all the material. Whoop!

An addition to the family

We suffered another small bereavement a little while ago. Not on the same scale as my Mum, of course, but closer to home, at least in a geographical sense.

One of the cherry barbs developed dropsy and had to be humanely euthanised (i.e. transferred to a small bowl of water and left in the freezer for half an hour). This, coupled with the mysterious loss of another fish somewhere along the line (eaten, presumably, although there was never any evidence), reduced the number of cherries to 7 and started me thinking about adding another shoal of something different to the tank.

So on a recent visit to the aquatic centre to gather more food supplies for our fishy friends, we dropped into the basement to see what was on offer, and found these:

They're red ocellated barbs, and they look even more attractive IRL than in this photo.

They also have the added advantage that - being barbs - they should mix in with our existing cherries just fine.

Which is exactly how it went. After a short period of argy-bargy, the new shoal of five all settled down and got along swimmingly (*cough*) with the other seven. For the first few days the ocellated crowd were *extremely* excited at feeding time, rushing up to the surface and gobbling the food while it was still floating. I guess they don't feed very often at the shop. Within a few days they'd realised that food was going to be a regular feature of life in the new place, and calmed down a bit.

Potato technology

It's no secret that I love potatoes, but until this last weekend my love-affair with them had only extended as far as the usual mashed, roasted, chipped and baked, with the odd portion of home fries thrown in for good measure.

With the kitchen refit well underway we've been looking to get rid of (i.e. sell) the washing machine and tumble dryer. The latter proved quite easy, since the electrician who turned up to do the first fix electrics had a washer like ours and was interested in the matching dryer. We shook hands on a price and he took it away with him the same day.

Not so simple with the washer. I was going to put it on eBay, but a few minutes research revealed that, even though we've not had any trouble with it in 4+ years, this model is widely reviewed as the worst thing Hotpoint has ever produced. The reviews even mention the faint odour of mildew that we've been noticing over the past few months.

Instead, I offered it on Gumtree at a knock-down price. I had four enquiries within four hours and the first of those emailed to arrange collection on Saturday. They duly turned up, inspected it, handed over the dosh and went away happy while I carried on painting.

It wasn't until a few hours later, when I'd finished painting, washed my roller in the sink and was listening to the gentle splatter of green painty water onto bare floorboards as the sink emptied, that I remembered disconnecting the washing machine would leave a spigot-shaped hole in the drain.

Bugger. I scouted around in vain for something to plug the gap. No "official" blanking plugs for the drain assembly exist - it was installed long before we moved in. No gaffer tape. No glueable artefacts of any kind. Luckily my natural inclination to think of potatoes every few minutes soon came to my rescue.

Deploy the potato! Obvious really. That's something of which we always have "a spare" handy. I made doubly sure of a seal by coring out a plug and then twisting the other side of the spud over the spigot. Works a treat. I'm keeping another one in reserve in case it dries out before the sink is removed in a week or so.

Ribbit, and rip it

21-day tape, it said. Masking tape has a "day value". It's meant to be the number of days you can leave the tape in place and still be able to remove it without damage to the surface. My Frog Tape has been up since yesterday morning, and today, after completing the second coat of Willow Tree, I took it down. My previous traumatic experience in the bedroom has been on my mind a lot this weekend and I was determined not to leave the tape in place a moment longer than necessary. The "oldest" piece was up for about 27 hours.

Do not use on paint that has not been properly cured, it said. Leave it at least 3 days, it said. I left it 7.

Click on the photo to see the full extent of the damage. True, it was nowhere near as bad as the bedroom. Only somewhere between 10-15% (linear) of the ceiling had its paint pulled off. With the old blue tape it was closer to 90%.

A six-fold improvement is, however, still not perfect, and leaves me with a patch-up job to do next weekend. On the positive side, Frog Tape's clever system of a polymer gel (or something) that expands as soon as the emulsion paint wets it, sealing the edge of the tape and leaving a perfectly clean line, did work very well in those areas where the tape came off without damage. I'd definitely use it again.

Greening the kitchen

When we left it, the kitchen was all over white. That was a week ago, and today it was time to begin the process of greening. Because for the walls, we've chosen Willow Tree from Dulux's Kitchen & Bathroom range.

This was also my first chance to use the spiffing new masking tape supplied by Lady Fletcher of East York (thanks Shirley!). Strangely matching the green theme of the day, Frog Tape (it turns out) is actually made in Hemel Hempstead and is - according to the packaging at least - every decorator's friend.

So up it went to protect the white loveliness of the ceiling while I engaged in covering the walls with Willow Tree.

Put it on eBay

That's a phrase that has echoed around our house - both houses actually - for almost ten years. Whenever we inherit or find something, or for one reason or another it becomes surplus to requirements, but it's "just too good" to throw out. Like it still works, or it was originally quite expensive. We have some sort of investment in it still - emotional, financial, psychological - that prevents us from driving it to the tip.

I'm not pretending we never chuck stuff out. We do. But there's always more. And increasingly (it seems) the stuff is still OK. Still serviceable, usable, whatever. Just not by us.

So "the eBay pile" has been growing for many years. That old hi-fi stack I never use. It was all wired up in our previous house. Played occasionally. But that was in the B.I. years. The time Before iPod. When listening to music entailed physically inserting a CD or a cassette tape (a WHAT? Google it) into a device and pressing a real, solid, play button. Not clicking an icon that just *looks* like a play button. Anyhow when we moved, this lovely old stereo stack in its smoked-glass-and-mahogany cabinet came with us and lived under the stairs - well, the loft ladder - for three years. Then the loft ladder was replaced with stairs and the cabinet had to move into the study. Then into the dining room. Still never connected. Never played. Listen, I spent over £2,000 on in it 1984! I can't just throw it out!

The Christmas tree stand that we don't need since we started using an artificial tree that has its own feet. An old telephoto lens for a camera long since crushed under the boot heel of digital technology. The camera that it fits. The aluminium flight case I carried them both around in. The socket set I used to use to service my car, in the days when I did my own car servicing (OK, this item has been kicking around for a lot longer than ten years. It sat in the garage of my old house in Yorkshire quietly rusting away for most of the 12 years I lived in that house, and I hadn't used it much in the ten years before THAT).

You get the picture.

Three months ago something snapped. "Put in on eBay" became something more than just one of those things we say that doesn't really mean what the words imply. I actually listed some things on eBay. What? Yes, you read that right. I started small. A couple of things on the Saturday, and a couple more on Sunday. Just to ease myself into it. And you know what? It was easy. I said I started small, but one of the first things I listed was that stereo. I figured hey, if I'm going to dump my emotional baggage let's start with the biggest bag. It had 11 watchers within 12 hours. It sold easily, and for more than twice the starting price. The guy drove up from Northampton for it.

There's no stopping me now. Well, not quite. I still wait for those "zero listing fee" weekends. eBay gets enough money out of me when I sell the stuff. I'm not giving them anything up front. But gradually, all that tat that's been hanging around for years is disappearing. And the bank balance is rising!

I picked a good time to get into this, when you remember that we just inherited the contents of an entire second house. And 95% of the stuff in it is both stuff we don't want, AND stuff that is "too good to throw out." Only one answer to that. Put it on eBay.

Print this

A 6-month-long experiment concluded today. The experiment, if it had enjoyed a title, would have been called something like "How long will printout continue to be usable in the face of dire warnings regarding ink levels from the Lexmark print dialog?"

Some background: Four or five times a year, I print off a set of posters for the Chorlton Players containing groups of the photos I've taken at dress rehearsal. Six pages of A4 in total. Back in January when I was printing the panto photos I had the first warning from Lex (the American guy who makes such handy announcements as "printing started" and "printing complete" just in case, you know, you hadn't noticed that the paper had started being fed through the machine, or stopped, respectively).

"Colour ink is low!" he declared in his pleasant, mid-Atlantic tones.

Well I was near the end of the run back then (why am I talking like a Texan in my head? I almost added "y'all" at the end there) so I didn't worry about it, and I don't print much colour stuff normally anyway. Just those nice little green Asda vouchers that pop out almost every week as a result of their "10% cheaper than every other store" claim.

So I continued to ignore the little red "X" in my colour cartridge silo, until it came time to print the next set of Players' photos, in March. Way back when I first started to do these posters, I'd reckoned on getting 3 sets out of a colour cartridge. The panto posters had been set #3 and that little red X had been glowering at me for a couple of months. But then I figured hey! Paper is cheap. Ink is expensive. Why don't I just carry on printing stuff out until it starts to fade? That way, I've only wasted a sheet of paper, and I'll have made sure that ALL the ink is used up.

The more quick-witted of you will probably have reached this conclusion several years ago. Sometimes, in prosaic matters such as these, I can be a bit slow.

Players Posters Set #4 printed off, in their entirety, without incident. I'd checked the little box to stop Lex warning me weeks before, so not only were the posters just dandy, but I didn't get nagged either.

Fast forward to the Players' annual comedy sketch show (normally known as the Hotpot show, but this year featuring a specially written farce cleverly embedding several sketches within it) and by this time there wasn't much black ink left either. So little, in fact, that I'd been warned several weeks previously that the cartridge was now on its reserve tank! Order your new cartridges immediately!

Naturally I'd bought replacement cartridges several months before, but I'd got the bit between my teeth now. No way I was replacing those damn cartridges now until they'd been bled completely dry. Dagnabbit!

The posters for Hotpot, aka Players Posters Set #5, printed off, in their entirety, without incident. Now THAT was a surprise, I can tell you. By the end of the run the little colour ink marker had been swapped out for a diluted, faded version no doubt intended to offer a compelling visual clue to the impending colourlessness of my printing. The black ink "X" had long since disappeared altogether, the black silo showing completely empty and devoid of any X, faded or otherwise.

That was back in May. Finally, today, I printed a letter and the last paragraph was illegible. So that's an expensive lesson learned. If I'd swapped out the cartridges when first warned, assuming there wasn't enough ink left to complete a poster run, I'd have missed out on almost half a year's worth of printing.

Paper is cheap. Ink is expensive. I'll remember that from now on.

Next morning is no time for mourning

If plastering is the stage where a room turns its back on being a building site, then the first coat of paint is where it starts to look forward to being a room again. Back from yesterday's funeral, if we were to have any chance of staying on schedule with the kitchen then today was the day I had to start painting. And I did. An 8am start, a 15-minute break for breakfast on the hoof, I was finished by half past three.

Well, it's a big room, and the first coat always takes the longest. The plaster slurps up the paint as fast as I can apply it, and the entire area - walls AND ceiling - needs painting, so it takes a while.

Worth it though:

Not bad, as funerals go

Kind of ironic, having a funeral on "the glorious twelfth," but knowing both my parents' sense of humour I'm sure they will have appreciated it.

Yes, I have the tense of that sentence correct. Sitting up there, on their cloud (or whatever imagery you prefer), they are still present, and have a future, both in grammatical and spiritual terms.

It was a very nice service, even though the lady who took it was in (or near to) tears for most of the time. She knew Mum very well. Let no-one ever try to tell me there’s nothing “in” Spiritualism. When we originally met with the funeral director, he asked if Mum belonged to any particular religious denomination, and naturally I told him she was a Spiritualist. This didn’t faze him in the slightest. He told us he had several contacts from that neck of the ecclesiastical woods who might be prepared to hold the service, and called me the next day to say he’d found someone and she would be phoning me shortly to go over what we wanted in the service, gather some anecdotes etc to mention in the address – the usual sort of thing.

Anyway this lady called me the next day when we were back at home. She was the first name on his list (of five) that the funeral director had called. When he told her who the service was for, she said she got chills down her back. Because Mum had asked her FOUR YEARS AGO if she would give the eulogy. And they’d sat down for half an hour with a tape recorder running, discussing all the memories and music she wanted at the service.

Some people would no doubt say “coincidence.” I think different.

I have that tape albeit with nothing to play it on. I'll be arranging to have it transferred onto CD soon. So thanks for asking how I am, but really... I’m fine. I’ve been fine all along. My Dad’s passing back in 1993 was a shock – unexpected, and traumatic because it separated him and my Mum. Mum’s passing was not unexpected. More: it was wished for (by her). They are reunited now, and happy. I have nothing to be sad about...

Since the "family seat" had been tarnished by years of living downstairs - bed in the dining room, clothes, pharmaceutical supplies and medical notes everywhere, etc - it wasn't really suitable for "keeping up" the funeral, so we repaired to the Test Match where the new landlord laid on a fine buffet lunch for the 20 of us and we sat and chatted and reminisced in the usual way of these things. No-one stayed much past 3pm, which suited us as it meant we could hit the road back to Manchester before the Friday afternoon rush started. Something else Mum would have approved of :o)

Plastered again

Probably my favourite part of "doing up" any room, this. The plastering. Not only a fascinating skill to watch, and one that I have never mastered (so it impresses me every time) but also the single most impactful change to a room. The one where it goes from tatty old building site to almost-pristine new room in a few days. Three days in this case, as our plasterer Neil was working on his own.

Day 1 (Monday of last week) was pretty much taken up with preparing for the skim coat. The inside of the chimney breast, where the new induction hob will go, was "dot and dabbed" with plasterboard, edged with... er... edging strip, and scrim cloth applied.

The rest of the room had browning plaster slapped on all exposed brickwork and deep gaps, as well as a bit more dot and dab at the original cooker site, and a clever rectangle of metal mesh laid over the plywood sheet that occupied the space where the new radiator will go. The plumber was convinced the entire room would be dot and dabbed, rather than simply skimmed, and wouldn't be gainsayed, so he wanted to make sure there was a good purchase for his mounting screws. Fine for him; a bit of a headache for the spread.

Day 2 and the skimming started with the ceiling and the long wall starting to look finished. Our plasterer carries with him the traditional tradesman's portable radio, tuned permanently to Rock Radio. Not only an expert spread but a fine taste in music too!


After lunch, the end wall was completed, along with the insides of the chimney breast, and the sides of the left-hand ex-cupboard space. Things were definitely taking shape.

Finally on Day 3 the front of the chimney breast, old cooker wall and the boiler/window wall all got their skim coat and the job was done.

All we can do now is to wait until the whole room dries out (from previous experience I'd estimate about a week) before I can start slapping on the paint.

Access all areas

First job of the reconstruction, and carefully scheduled so that any inadvertent damage to the plasterwork comes *before* the plasterer's visit - the replacement of the old, drafty, maintenance-intensive wooden patio doors with a new set of draft-free, maintenance-free, high U value, PVCu patio doors with a single pane above:

The manufacturer's tape, just in case you were wondering, has been left on deliberately to protect the frames from (a) the new plaster and (b) my painting. It'll come off in a couple of weeks.

A bit of knock-off

The final final deconstruction was something else I felt competent to manage myself. I'm pretty good at demolition :o)

The skirting board and picture rails had to come off. Me and my trusty crowbar accomplished that in considerably less than half an hour (including cleaning up time). The only slight accident - and it's one that we predicted given its extremely loose attachment - was the total loss of plaster on the chimney breast beneath the picture rail. An area about 18 inches deep and already disturbed by the reconstruction work on the brickwork, it never really stood a chance once I got going with the crowbar.

With this and the section behind the old cooker now both back to the brick, we thought it prudent to call the plasterer back for another look before he gave us his final quote!

Deconstruction - final phase

Another short hiatus for this blog - how the time flies. Good job I don't rely on a regular flow of posts for my income or I'd be destitute.

We've been distracted from the ongoing kitchen saga by a 2-day trip to Nottingham to sort out legal and logistical stuff following Mum's death (death certificate, notifying various authorities, meeting solicitor, arranging funeral, that kind of thing) as well as trying to sort out almost 60 years of "stuff" in her house. Yes, that's going to take more than 2 days, but at least we made a start. Not surprising that I've not felt much like blogging; just annoying that I'd only just picked up the metaphorical quill again before all this kicked off. Anyway, the funeral's Friday, so I thought I'd bang out a bit more kitchen-related news to pass the time.

When we left off, I mentioned there were two more demolition/deconstruction jobs to do before things began to get better. The first of these was the first-fix plumbing.

A couple of small items - disconnecting and removing a radiator from one end of the kitchen and plumbing in a supply for the new radiator in its new position behind the door; and sinking the main supply pipes to the boiler under the floor from their previous run which was behind the old cupboard, and in the new world would have been behind the cooker (not to mention in the way of coring out the wall to allow the tumble drier to vent).

The main thing though, was to resite the sink unit away from the wall to allow the plasterer space to plaster, while still allowing us a usable sink until the last possible day.

<---before







after--->



Looks a bit strange, but it serves its purpose. And our plasterer is a big guy. Needs a lot of room. I only wish we'd remembered to move the old cooker out before the plumber reconnected the sink. Doh!

For once, I have no clever title

Woke at 1.01am for yet another nocturnal "visit" and, still wide awake more than an hour later, I finally decided I might as well get up. The clock check was 2.22. I experience a lot of these nicely patterned times, especially at night (I've written several times about them before under the 'spookiness' tag) and I have no idea why. Maybe seeing patterns in things is a sign of mental illness. But there again, being able to wonder if it is is probably a sign that I'm alright. :o) But this post isn't about spooky patterns on the clock, or insomnia.

My Mum died on Sunday night.

Didn't get much sleep that night either, but more a case of never getting to sleep in the first place. At least, not until after 3.30. And then I was up again two hours later. Last night was a bit better (being knackered helps) but tonight it looks like I'm back on the merry-go-round of thinking of everything I need to do, and things I already did. Things I didn't do that maybe I should have.

I've been telling people it wasn't unexpected, and it wasn't. She had COPD, and everyone knows that's a one-way street, but more than that - after the events of recent weeks we would have to have been abnormally ostrich-like not to expect "the worst." But can you ever be prepared for it? Maybe on an intellectual level. Perhaps that intellectual preparation allows you to skip the traditional first stage of grief - i.e. denial. Although, you know, the irony of denying that I'm in denial is not lost on me. I seem to be missing out on the 'anger' part as well. Who would I be angry with? Mum? It's hardly her fault (apart from the smoking of course, but it feels like it's always been decades too late to do anything about that). The care home? They did what they could. God? Let's not even go there. And what would I be angry about? That she's free from pain? No longer has to fight to get every breath? That - the next few weeks of estate management aside - I'm absolved from the duty of those five-hour round trips to visit someone who had become unrecognisable as the woman most often referred to as "awesome" by my friends, old and new, and those of my in-laws that met her. Whose failing memory left her incapable of remembering conversations we'd repeated four times since our arrival not half an hour earlier? And, perhaps more significantly, of remembering that we had visited at all. Or telephoned, on the weeks we couldn't visit.

I'd rather friends remembered her as the vibrant capable welcoming whirlwind who cooked up a full fried English breakfast for eight when we dropped in unannounced one Bank Holiday Monday morning after an all-night party. That breakfast is still fondly remembered more than thirty years later by all who partook.

There's a lot more to say, but I have that happy memory in my mind so I'll stop for now.