Now I don't do pants, No, the very thought of scorched pants still makes me feel queezy!

Another very busy week in the Annex with the plumbers finishing their 'First fix' and the builder completing the vast majority of his workload. The concept that we envisaged all those months ago is now, at last, coming together.
We now have one week to decorate the pants off the place before the plumber returns to install all the equipment that they have laid the 5,000 miles of copper piping to supply and the electrician to connect their supplies that they have diligently been organising. Our job is further complicated by the need to let several walls of plaster dry and the kitchen and bathroom floor dry as they had to have a layer of concrete laid to level them.

However, it is all looking the business and for the first time in a long while I have been able to get the car into the garage and that was despite installing a large chest freezer in there as well. All I have to do now is find some large chests to freeze! Ding-Dong.

I obtained the freezer, which is about 80cm (H) x 60cm (D) x 120cm (W), from my old favourites at James Becks Auctions today.
We desperately needed the freezing capacity as our existing back-up freezer is crammed full with ten tonne of fruit (not surprisingly to my regular readers) mainly consisting of plums, plums and then some more plums. Now we are moving into Runner beans & Blackberries and these will be closely followed by the apples.





So anyway, this all meant that we had been looking out for a chest freezer for several weeks at the Auctions but to no avail. This week I put in another collection of 'stuff' to try to get some cash and to attempt to clear more of the "we may need it at sometime" collection of useless things. 3 rugs that were not ever going to clean up, our old cassette box full of (and I mean full, some 90 cassettes) ....full of those infamous mixed taps that we used to make before we stepped up to the challenge of swamping our selves with the new fangled mixed CD's! With which we are now swamped now that the mp3 players take us to a new extreme of 30,000 tunes in a box the size of a cassette tape! Madness!

Back to the Auction, Mr Becks (the auctioneer) has a mischievous way about him and as he warms up he becomes more humorous with the odd quip. A few weeks back he finished a 'lot' and then walked past this large and obviously very empty Parrot cage. He stopped and stared at the cage for just a few seconds and in an Eric Morecambe forlorn way he quietly said...  "That's a very sad story there" and then swiftly moved on making no further reference to it again. We all looked at this sad empty cage and you know he was making it up but you couldn't help but wonder....

So there is my 'stuff' on the floor with bidders rummaging through it as if they owned it Not yet matey, lets see yer wonga first eh? And right next to it was a chest freezer. My Lot numbers were 158 and 159 and the freezer was 160. Now I had been checking the price of the things and brand new they ranged from £259 through to £390 so I set a maximum bid of £70 and waited.

My stuff can just be seen behind the freezer with some of my picture frames leaning against the bed.

First my stuff was bid upon and finally came to a grand sum of £25. That'll go towards the Freezer I thought. He started the bidding for the freezer, I played it like Cool Hand Luke and waited....
"£30?" he attempted to start the bidding, silence, "£20 then" he looked thoroughly around the room, "It's in perfect working order......", nothing, "Well £10 then" I put my hand up and he acknowledged the bid. Again he looked around the room attentively stretching out the bid as long as he could reasonably do so finally closing the deal with me at just a tenner. Another Thomas bargain! I just hope that it does work, it is on test in the garage and I probably won't bother telling you if it crashes and burns, no I'll just leave it that I got another great deal.

I am, for those of you that are interested, really enjoying running the B&B. It feeds a craving that I have been developing over the last 5-10 years. I know that it is the slippery slope to a full blown obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and I reckon if it don't hurt anyone then why should it bother them. I know that one day I shall get my fingers burnt doing this, but it is a risk that I am willing to take in the pursuance of excellence.
So what strange affliction do I burden myself with? The ironing. I just love producing a smooth garment or linen. Now I don't do pants, the very thought turns my stomach. They say that the sense of smell is one of the strongest when it comes to memories and I can still remember my Grand-mother leaving the iron on my grandfathers pants when she was distracted (probably by me) and the most awful of burning smells that ensued. No, the very thought of scorched pants still makes me feel queezy!

BUT I DO do just about everything else that is not a 'small'. I plan my washing so that I can take it out of the machine just as the thing stops so that I can hang it immediately to minimise any possible creases. Now this may be where I touch the outer edges of the OCD spectrum. If I get interrupted and fail to get them out of the machine in time to minimise those creases, well then I just have to shove them ALL back into the machine again and put them through another Rinse and Spin cycle. DO NOT MESS WITH ME ON MY WASHING DAYS, I'M NOT A NICE PERSON!
It is in the matter of seeking perfection in this area that I have become so frustrated at the problem of ironing sheets, Duvets and indeed table cloths. You see you do all that ironing and then go and fold the bally things up so you can put them away and when you get them back out again, low & behold you have a criss cross of fold creases. Well I couldn't handle this any more and close to breaking point it dawned on me that I could roll these large items up after ironing them and then there would be no creases.
So there I was looking all butch in B&Q buying 4 x 2mtr long lengths of sink waste water pipes so that when I got home I could put on my pinny and become Michael home-maker. So I iron my table cloth, then I roll it onto this drain pipe place a couple of elastic bands on the ends and one loosely in the middle. Then, when I need my uncreased table cloth, I simply position the loose end in the correct place on the table and wooosh I push the roll away from me and the table cloth is laid.
Nothing odd about that ........   is there?







2,140

All local people, it is a pleasure to work with such amiable professionals,.....

 The weeks have flown past since my last blog with friends and family visiting, builders, electricians and Plumbers working and probably the most important of all the arrival of our first Guests!


We had started receiving calls and enquiries regarding the B&B side of things in earnest several weeks back and as a result we ended up having our first guests at the latter part of July. I do not intend to talk or blog about our guests, this is not why the site exists and clearly would be totally unethical and improper. I will talk in general terms about the business and issues that may come up, if appropriate and unspecific, but not of events and people. As they say what happens in Norfolk stays in Norfolk!


I will say that we are really pleased with the initial reaction to our B&B from those that have stayed with us and that two sets of guests have decided to extend their stay with us by several days as they have enjoyed the service provided so much.


So whilst we are striving to come to terms with setting up routines and establishing resolutions to problems now that we are 'live' we still have the ongoing project of refurbishing the Annex.
This has involved a builder, electrical contractor, Plumbers and glazier, and a considerable amount of planning and organising. Tying all the contractors timetables in together has been the biggest challenge but it has so far gone well.
We have been very impressed at all the guys working for us on this project both with their commitment and with their 'can do' attitude. All local people, it is a pleasure to work with such amiable professionals,  I think the youngsters are outstandingly courteous for their age and have a great work ethic which has been lacking in some of the more arrogant contractors that I have come across in my previous role (Not all of which should be tarred with this brush).   


So what have we achieved?

Well the kitchen and Bathroom areas have been completely overhauled with new Electrics and plumbing and much of the old tiles, rendering and plaster has been removed to allow for new fresher and more stable plaster to be placed back on to the walls.
The picture to the right shows the state of a wall behind the render and the varied mix of building methods and materials. As I have said before flints are a major obstacle to attaching anything to the walls and so I have used this photo to record exactly every pipe cable and flinted area is. By printing the photo and writing the measurements straight onto it I have recorded all the areas that I CAN screw or drill into. Today this was all rendered over and is now invisible and so I will rely on my record to ensure that I do not blow myself up when drilling into the wall.


This has not been without precedent as many years ago I blindly nailed a hardboard sheet to the floor of my bathroom in preparation for a new floor to be laid.
A swift bang on the nails head caused a whisper of a hiss of leaking water. Mmmmm, not good, I thought, or rather I didn't think as I elected to pluck out the nail as if this would bring an end to the problem.


Well Durrrrrrrrrr! It had quite the opposite effect,something happened that with hindsight is now quite obvious to me but at the time simply didn't even occur as the tiniest of thoughts. I pulled the nail out to stop said hissing, nail comes out easily closely followed by a mini geyser of water, which had no intention of stopping and any foolish attempt to replace the nail was greeted by a mocking spray of water all over my top.
LESSON No.1 ~ DO NOT BANG A NAIL INTO FLOORBOARDS UNDER WHICH PIPES MAY LAY.
LESSON No.2 ~ IF YOU HAMMER A NAIL INTO A WATER PIPE THEN DO NOT MAKE ANY ATTEMPT TO REMOVE IT AND ISOLATE THE WATER SUPPLY.


It has been a lon day to day and so tomorrow I shall attempt to give more of an indication of the status of the property so far, but in summary we are please with what has been achieved and we are driving forward to complete prior to October 1st as we are renting the place out for 3 months at that point.


FINGERS CROSSED, EVERYBODY!


















2,047

Where you Bin?

For the first few months of living in this house I was fooled out of bed several times by the sound of the rubbish cart arriving just across the road from my bedroom. I stumbled out of bed, almost dropped to the floor as my bad knee offers no assistance to the task of walking, or even standing for that matter, immediately after any kind of a rest. "Bugger, bugger, bugger" I chant as I know that I haven't put the bin out the night before and if I don't get down stairs pronto they will pass me by and it will be another two weeks before they take away the already stinky kipper that I found at the bottom of the fridge just after they came TWO WEEKS AGO!

So, I clambered back up the side of the bed, hobble over to the door and throw my dressing gown on just as I hear a beep, beep, beep emanate from the reversing rubbish cart. It sounds like it's reversing towards our back yard. So I set off with added momentum down the stairs in a race to beat the efficient Bin men, but with a caution as my knee hates going down stairs so I end up sort of walking side saddle, one step at a time giving me the appearance of Quasimodo descending the stairs in the tower of Notra Dame. Mumbling and cursing under my breath I head to the back door. It's raining. It always rained when I hadn't put the bin out! So I have to slip on my wellies. Bare feet in wellies feels very odd indeed and a kind of plunger effect occurs with every step causing a farty noise to sound out across an otherwise silent garden.

So you can picture the scene, I look a little like Paddington bear with my dressing gown as the duffle coat and my wellington boots on my feet I grab the wheelie bin wrestling it out of the back gate , making a fart noise with every step to the kerb where I defiantly slam it down.
HA! Beat the blighters!

Then I drag my self back up-stairs to get dressed and realise that the dust cart is still in the same place and actually when it moved it drove off out of the village leaving having only processed a handful of bins.
This is madness! I declare to myself, what an earth?..........

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This was on a Tuesday. My bins are emptied on a Thursday. Well it is all very confusing when you first wake up isn't it?
SO WHY DOES THE DUST CART drive into our village empty just 6-8 bins and leave, not returning for two days to finish the rest of the village's bins?

Eventually Andy, my neighbour right across the road and one of those select few that have their bins emptied on this preferential scheme, sheds some light on this anomaly.

Apparently the Council send out a smaller dust cart to do all the small tracks and lanes in the area, as it can reverse up the lanes easily. Sure enough the bins are collected from a small lane opposite us but I assume the dust cart has so many bins to collect that they now send a big cart to collect the bins, so it can't get up the lane anyway. As a result it just sits on the road whilst the dustmen walk up the short lane to get the bins. So effectively the whole point of its existence is nullified as the other dust cart could easily just pick up the same bins when it does its tour of duty

You see even the council have been infected by the infamous NFN virus!;'/\

Several months later I did exactly the same thing only to realise, as I fart walked out to the street with my recycling bin that this time I got out of bed for nothing, again, because all this dust cart took was the handful of brown, garden waste, bins.

I just stood there, in the rain of course, eye ball to eyeball with a dustman without a shred of dignity or any ability to save face, he knew that I knew that he knew that I thought he was the regular bin pick-up.

I sidled off sheepishly, trying to look as cool a dude as you can dressed in your towel dressing gown, in your wellies in the rain. I withdrew to the sanctuary of the walled garden and silently closed the gate behind me and all the dustman would have heard on the other side of the gate would have been a whispered "Bugger!".



1,959

Bricks don't bend.

I have a great respect for the previous owner whom, I understand, gave up a career as a structural engineer to take up the calling of priesthood. His Grandfather designed most of the civic buildings in Dublin and it seems that much of this architectural (thank God for spell check eh!) skill rubbed off on to his Grandchild. As he designed the oak staircase in our house and also built the summer house, much of the garden wall and a conservatory.

However I feel that whilst carrying out his missionary work here in deepest Norfolk he contracted the debilitating disease known as NFN. This as I have explained previously (including the first ever Blog on this site) a condition that renders the sufferer to deal with things from an unexpected direction or thought process, logic rarely playing any part in the patients reality. It is abbreviated to NFN but the full name is Normal For Norfolk.

For example I believe that he re-built the chimney in the living room. I maybe wrong but either way whoever built this chimney clearly suffered a mild dose of NFN. Starting at the foundations the bricks were true and level. In every likelihood a spirit level was introduced to the scheme and some logic applied.
HOWEVER, a cross beam of upright bricks placed at a slight, but yet interesting, curve caused the builder to pull on the logical side of his brain, but this was confused by the NFN virus and he could see no way forward other than to place the next layer of bricks in line with this new curve. From then on things just got worse as each consecutive layer of bricks was placed the curve became more and more pronounced (much like the pea under the mattress the thing became more and more of an issue that by the time it reached the top it was almost a lost cause.
You can see that at one point he tried to break this cycle by trying to bend a brick (2nd one up from the mantelpiece and 2nd along). BUT once again afflicted by the NFN virus he did not 'get' the fact that BRICKS DON'T BEND and having had the brick snap at the attempt he just put it in any way, in the two halves one at a slightly jaunty angle. We have two of these fireplaces and they aren't wrong.......... They are just 'different'.

That's what my school teacher used to say about my work at school, He'd say, "Michael" as the other kids laughed, "It's not wrong, it is just different". Unfortunately, and in hindsight, it was a little cruel of him as he was my maths teacher and I now know that generally speaking there is rarely more than one answer to a sum. Between you and me I think he was taking the 'P' out of me!

THERE IS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. Please don't have nightmares about contracting NFN as it has a very long gestation period and you would have to be living in Norfolk for many a year before you would succumb to the disease in it's most prevalent form.

Now back to the previous owners design eccentricities, We have a small front yard, the centre of which is lower than the surrounding land and unfortunately at times of heavy rain a very deep puddle can form very quickly. Sadly this puddle can breach the Garage doors flooding the room. So to overcome this a pump has been fitted down in the drain in the centre of the yard. Clever, I hear you say.     Mmmmmmmmm......

The problem is all the pump does is pump the water from the drain up to a large green water butt. Again, I can hear you mummble Clever......

BUT once the tank is full it just overflows and the water bubbles ferociously back out again, down the sides of the butt, across the yard and right back into the drain from whence it first came! Charlie Dimmock would be proud of me as it is a full on Water Feature.

Perhaps at this point a picture would illustrate the issue....

The drain is just in-front of the big blue bag and it pumps the water into the butt on the far right of the photo, where if it is not emptied it spills over the top of the tank flowing back down into the drain where once again it is pumped back up to the tank and so on and so on.


To over come this NFN design I have placed a hose pipe trailing it from the water tank right across the yard (see the above photo) to the street where it oozes out into the street drain. Now the question is why the pump simply just doesn't pump the excess water straight out onto the street in the first place especially as the street is only 4' to the right of the blue bag?

I do hope that you are keeping up with this!

AND THEN further to this Heath Robinson design and knowing that the yard floods in times of heavy rain they decide to take the drain pipe that collects all the water from the big roof seen in the photo and send it pouring into the yard. If however you study the photo to the left you'll see that the drain pipe ends neatly over the road. Someone has then gone to quite some trouble to bend the pipe all the way back into the yard so it can fill it up like the bow of the bloody Titanic!


So anyway, the pump works fine, well it does now as I spent an hour a few weeks back pulling several years of black sludge out of it.

It works fine until today when God decided to follow up the previous tornado with a hearty Hurricane. Claire and I were driving into the village in quite normal but slightly hot weather. The windows were all open, when quite literally as we entered the village the car was attacked by the most freakish high winds. I mean they came as a total surprise hitting us at some great velocity causing me to struggle with steering the car. We got home and the wind was howling, we were bringing Scribble our cat back from the Vets, and we both simultaneously thought of Dorothy & Toto from the Wizard of Oz and that house disapearing into the sky,

Within minutes torrential rain plummeted from the heavens  and the house was thrown into darkness, mainly because of a power cut.

This meant two very important things to us.

Firstly NO TEA!

Secondly no power meant no pump in the yard and at the very time we really needed that pump to stop the annex flooding. We checked the yard and inch by inch the water lapped up closer & closer to the garage doors. Alison, Claire & I all worked on lifting all water damage risk items from the floor of the Annex including all of the builders heavy cement bags.

Then Alison or Claire, or both had the brain wave to use the builders sack of sand to make sand bags to dam the doors. We went out into the rain and started to fill which ever bags we could get our hands on with sand. We used full bags of compost, Sainsburys bags of life (not any more) and even an Ikea blue bag eventually stemming the flow just before it breached the line.

Once again there were tiny frogs ever where like some kind of croaking plague. The power was still off by the time we had finished and so we could only get out the Chinese takeaway menu and 'order-up'!

The rain has stopped, The frog have all gone home, I am full and I owe the builder some sand.

Oh and the power came back on about an hour later. I am going to have to think of contingency plans for when (if ever) we go on holiday. But that is for another day.




1,955

FUTILITY .

The Vicar of Dibley had a great illustration of how villages and villagers remember events that effected them or that were out of the norm. They reminisced about the Great storm of '87 then went on to recall the slightly lesser Great wind which was nearly as bad as the Great Storm but it just didn't have the rain. This led them to talk of the Great Snow of '54 and their rather flaky memories tried further to decide who died in what ferocious climate calamity, was it the Great Frost or indeed the Great Freeze of '48. Well I think that we had, last week, The Great Typhoon of 2011 albeit just about half an hours worth. As I sat in the office looking across a sunlit garden I noticed an incongruous dark sky beyond, a very, very ominous cloud was brewing up and seemed to be heading our way.

A lone pigeon was sitting abreast a chimney pot. He was looking totally the wrong way. I felt like shouting out to the bird "It's behind you!" But I didn't, choosing my normal course of action instead which is to drop everything and go and get my camera.

This cloud was one of the darkest that I had seen in several years and yet the sun was still slipping underneath it. Then the slight breeze started to muster up it's strength and every tree in the garden started to sway bending over further and further each time. Surly this was our moment, we were about to enter our very own Valhalla. The cloud appeared to fly over us as if it were a space ship or an enormous Zepplin, I know, they're already huge, But that just goes to demonstrate the magnitude of this monster.

Eventually "The Great Rain" arrived and boy did it bucket down. 12 buckets to be precise as that was how many leaks we had to stick a bucket or bowl under to catch the falling rain.

The street out side became a river and two of the windows in the guest room started to ooze water as if they were crying. Claire and Alison Had strategically placed several buckets along the wall below where the conservatory butted up to The main building, if it were to continue then it would have been a lost cause. However it made a withdrawal after about 25 minutes have successfully turned the junction out side to a river fit for a canoeist to ride the current. In short it was The Great Wet!

Yes the garden was crying out for this and yes it was far too late for the farmers, but boy what a show.

Then it moved on, moved towards another poor unfortunate leaving nothing but leaves and rose petals straggled across a rather unkempt lawn.

The remaining clouds then gathered together to facilitate, with the suns co-operation an enormous double rainbow
or, as we call it.....     The Great Rainbow!

Then we were left with your bulk standard 'normal' storm clouds and the moment had passed, with little Dorothy well on her way to the Land of Oz!











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With just a few days to go to our first guests arriving I noticed that there was a loo problem. Having gathered my thoughts and dug out my trusty plunger I was ready to carry-out an instant unblock. This should just take 30 seconds or so.

Three hours later having been down a man-hole cover up to my waist in ...........
Having used Stephens Germ warfare suit. Why has my son got a germ warfare suit you may ask? You may ask, until the cows come home because I have no idea why Stephen has such an item, although I do recall him mumbling something about it being cheap. This, in all fairness, is a good enough reason for me.
I looked like a grey haired fat over the hill Action Man, a look I have to admit, that I thought was quite fetching. So you can only imagine my surprise when the girls didn't want to hug me afterwards. Drain clearing is a very lonely job, something not helped by the fact that it was one of the few hot days that this summer produced. Phheeewwwyyyyyyyyy...

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My last little ditty is to remind you that we have bats, low flying ones at that and a few nights ago I resolved to photograph them.

This, my followers, is not as easy as you might think. Oh, you don't think it is very easy, well you'd be right. Alison and Claire thought it hilarious as I followed a bat, barely keeping up as it flew straight towards my head then ducked down and away into the darkness. FLASH! as my cameras flash-light lit nothing but a random patch of sky for the bat was 20 yards away giving me the bums rush.
There's another, up goes the camera and Whooooosh and I nearly fall to the ground in dizziness trying to catch up with it. So here for your enjoyment are the best of my Bat photos.....

The top of a bush

Sky

The side of the same bush, but a little bit further away.

Claire's head

A bit more sky, ALTHOUGH, I think there was a bat just to the left, or the right, or somewhere...

A BAT!!!!!!!