Roaming Zebra

I’m wondering what next is going to break at home? We’ve had a spate of things over the last six weeks, starting with the cistern filler on the bathroom toilet (it was taking about an hour to fill!), that was a relatively quick job to fix – though I had to change the isolation valve for a new one as the original plastic push-fit was impossible to turn on or off. It now has a shiny new metal push fit connector with a little tap on the isolation valve.

Next we had the fridge-freezer, which just randomly decided to stop chilling for long periods of time, and ordering a new one was a right PITA. It did eventually arrive, though about 2 weeks after the original date it was supposed to (the delivery company kept changing their mind about if they had it in stock). And it only just fitted in the back door!

And of course the lawnmower decided to pack in as well. I think we got a good deal on the new one (20% in Homebase at the time, and I got a 15% off voucher for using an AMEX card). And admittedly the new mower is much lighter and easier to use, but still I’d have preferred not to but a new one.

Oh and the display is malfunctioning in the car at the moment – the bit in the driver’s console which is supposed to tell you the radio station, just doesn’t do that bit anymore. Its under warranty, but I’ll have to take it into the garage to get it fixed, and just at the moment, we need the car to be available!

Last night, the kitchen tap decided that it wasn’t going to turn itself off. Its been stiff for a while and we’d actually decided which tap we were going to buy to replace it. The old one obviously new it was going to be replaced, so just failed. Quick rush to B&Q to get a new one – they didn’t have the one we’d picked and we needed to get it sorted just in case things started moving with the baby! So several hours later, I managed to get the new tap in place. Of course the box had those plastic seal strap things that are a pain to remove, and the edge of one was sharp which cut my hand to start off in the shop.

The box didn’t say if it included monobloc hoses, and the box was sealed, so I purchased a pair just in case, and thought push-fit would be quicker to install. To start with, the push-fits wouldn’t actually screw in to the tap – its got four hoses coming out of it as it has a pull-out hose built in. The push fit hoses are a tiny bit bigger than the supplied ones, so they didn’t fit meaning I had to resort to the supplied set. Now the old tap had screw fittings, but the opposite type to the ones on the new hoses. And the old tap hoses were a different diameter, so I couldn’t just swap them out. Incidentally, I also had to modify the cupboard interior to fit the new tap into the hole. Finally I got it all nearly screwed in, when I found the metal retainer underneath had to be pushed along a long bolt from the bottom, which I’d already nearly fully tightened. So I had to dismantle it again. Got everything in, but wasn’t sure about the top mounting, but I seemed to have used all the bits. Anyway, tested with the water on, started packing stuff into a box for the bin, and found the base bit of the tap sandwiched inside some foam packing. Disassemble again to install it, and reassemble. Get it all together and test, and the hot water hose decided from all the movement to pop off the pipe underneath pouring water everywhere. By now its 11.30pm, so I get it back together mop up a bit, but decide to leave the hot turned off at the service valve just in case. Finally this morning, I was happy its all together. Just noticed there’s a tiny teardrop leak on one of the valves, should be a quick tighten with a spanner, but who knows!

Grrr!

Tried to mow the lawn today, part way through the mower just died on me. Its obviously been burning a bit of oil recently from the slight smoke coming out of it.

It looked low on oil so I topped it up with some shiny new oil. Ran for about 2 mins with a big cloud of smoke before dying again. I guess more oil in the engine. Probably getting it up and down the garden steps has got oil well and truely round the engine.

I think a new on is in order! Electric this time!

Dug over the flower bed (rock solid!) at the plot, adding several bags of soil improver and compost. Its still pretty hard clay, but a bit better now. Added in Perlka to a bit of it as that’s where the Kale is going.

Well, I haven’t been updating very much recently – been kinda busy.

Have been repainting the doors from the kitchen cuoboards, which is a right pain. The doors were waxed, so I’ve had to get a lot of that off them before I can start painting. A combination of a hard work with wet and dry sandpaper, and a got with both white spirit and methlylated spirit with wire wool. As well as a go with some special wax remover seems to be working OK on them.

Having stripped off what I thought was all the wax, I started priming with a Farrow & Ball eco undercoat/primer. I noticed in a few places that some of the wax was coming thorugh, so ended up buying a shellac based paint (B.I.N.), which is supposed to stick to anything & block stains coming through. Its not the cheapest paint in the world (£15 / L), but seems to have done the trick. Its also useful for painting onto the formica type cupboard surfaces, as it sticks to anything to give a good base coat.

A couple more coats of undercoat and I was ready to start top-coating. Again I’m using a Farrow & Ball eco paint (eggshell) in tallow. The primer for this is the white F&B primer. I purchased this from my local paint store (a branch of Brewers), for some reason they stock a full range of eco paints, but not the undercoats, so I had to order that specially. It only took a couple of days to arrive, but you’d think that having the range of paints would mean they’d have the undercoats as well!

Anyway, both the undercoat and eggshell were quite good to work with, drying quickly and with very little smell (hence the Eco status of the paint). The eggshell is very low sheen (listed as 20% I think) and is “fully washable” according to the data sheets. Hopefully this means it will be easy to keep clean and won’t object to the odd splash of water from the sink!

The Eggshell paint has a very rich colour – I could probably have got away with just the one coat, but I wanted to make sure the cupboards have a hardwearing finish, and there were a few places I missed with the first coat.

I opted for applying the paint mostly using a foam gloss roller which gives a very fine finish and no brush marks. There’s a few places where a brush was necessary, like into the mouldings, but the paint is quite thick and the brush lines disappeared into the finish themselves.

I’ve finished phase 1 of the re-paint, that is to say I’ve done the doors from the ground level cupboards, kick-boards and some end-panels. Still have the drawer fronts and wall cupboards to do … must get around to starting on them soon!

Well, its been raining.

Quite a lot for the past few days.

Which has meant no allotment time for us.

River Stour flooding the road...

In fact it rained so much on Saturday that the river flooded the road at the bottom of our road – I’ve only seen it happen once before. Given the high volume of rain in a short period, I’d guess there wasn’t enough room under the bridge for all the water, so it just flooded around the side…

Several people tried to drive through, most backed out – apart from the Peugeot driver who of course got water in the exhaust and then couldn’t move anywhere. You’d think when the water is clearly deep, you’d stop and go back, well I would anyway!

And to finish off, a video of a bus forcing its way through the floods (apologies for the shaky start – someone walked in front of me as I started to film…)

Most of the Bank Holiday weekend just gone was spent building a deck in the garden. It was pretty much finished at the weekend, but I’ve only just got around to preparing the photos for upload!

We did have a pretty small patio area in the garden, which was mostly made up of cracked concrete with weeds breaking through so we decided it was time to do something about it. Given that I didn’t really want to lay paving slabs as that would require levelling the ground underneath properly first (and our house is at the top of a hill so the garden drops at the one side), I thought it would be easier to build a timber deck. Having worked at the Edinburgh Fringe festival for several seasons a few years ago, mostly during build weeks, working for a venue management company, I have quite a bit of experience of building substantial timber constructions (things like Church halls into temporary theatres with raised seating areas, stages ….). … which means I also suspect I might have slightly over-engineered the under frame of the deck!

All the timber was ordered from a local timber supply company (despite being called Lawnswood Fencing, they also supply a lot of exterior grade timber), and they can generally deliver pretty quickly. They are also quite a bit cheaper than the major DIY shops. Other stuff, like coated exterior decking screws came from Screwfix Direct (or rather the local trade counter). The only problem with going to the trade counter was that I was tempted into buying a new cordless drill/driver. Though I think that was a good investment given it has a lot more torque than my old one and a spare battery – which came in handy.

Noggins have been added for strength and as support for the deck being on uneaven concrete

The frame of the deck is built from 6″x2″ treated timber, with all cut ends coated with an exterior wood preserver. I spent a while looking at what size timber to use for this, and ended up deciding on the 6″x2″ based on other people’s recommendation on the Internet. I think if it wasn’t slightly raised at one side due to the garden being on a slope, I might have gone for a smaller grade timber. The photos shows the extra “noggin” bracing which I fitted to help stop movement of the deck, these bits are also dropped right to the underneath concrete level to act as weight support and to help stop any deck-bounce. The long timbers are spaced with maximum centres of 400mm. This then gives plenty of points where the top decking timber can be screwed in place.

The frame was nailed together using 4″ galvanised nails, and then fixed to the patio wall using ~15cm frame fixers. Note this isn’t the house wall – the patio area is further down the garden. Fitting at the house level would have meant considering damp proof courses, and ensuring the deck is below that level!

Underneath the timber frame is a heavy-duty anti-weed fabric. Its different from the normal landscape fabric as it isn’t intended to be planted through, basically its a plastic woven fabric, allowing water through, but not light. The one I bought was from Screwfix, its guaranteed UV stable in the UK for 5 years – given its under the deck its not going to get much light onto it anyway, so it should be good for a while.

The frame was actually part built away from its final location, then lifted into place before fitting the noggins – basically I needed space around it to work, but then didn’t want to have to try to move the complete timber frame given the weight. Once in place I checked it was sqaure (measure diagonally across both ways – the size should be the same if it is sqaure) before dropping the front supporting legs into the ground and adding Postfix (normally used for fence posts – it takes about 10 mins to set sufficiently that you can continue working).

The deck is almost complete!

Fitting the surface of the deck was probably the easiest part to do, though it was a killer for the knees! I’d designed the deck to be the width of the decking timber – i.e. no need to cut every deck board. The depth was also designed to be 24 boards long, with ~5mm gap between each one. That’s fine on paper, but of course timber is a natural product so you have to work around twisting, warping etc… Basically we layed the whole surface out, then shuffled the boards to get even gaps between them. I then fixed the one edge to stop movement and working in blocks of ~4 deck boards fixing the whole length of the 4 boards before moving on to the next batch of boards. When moving along, I fixed the centre point of the boards first – some boards needed pulling slightly to get them back straight.

Once the top was on, its mostly just finished off work – fitting the front and side with extra decking timber to cover the underneath frame for aesthetic reasons.

The deck lighting pictures has now been recessed into the deck – I didn’t have, and couldn’t get the correct sized hole-saw, so I ended up drawing round the lights, drilling some strategically placed holes and then using a jigsaw to cut the correct sized hole out. The lights are solar powered LED ones, so they don’t need wiring up and of course turn themselves on at appropriate levels of darkness.

All that is left for me to do now is to finish the front vertical covering – I was 1 deck board short. That’ll probably have to wait for the weekend when I can go to the timber yard to get another piece of wood. Then I need to sort the steps down from the upper bit of the garden – its only really 1 step now, but its falling to bits (cracked concrete and bricks). I think I might build a timber step down which will match the decking.

We’re also pondering if we need a handrail on 1 side of the deck – its about a 30cm, drop at the front corner, but then there’s a bench in the way …

On Saturday we travelled to Liverpool to see the arrival of the Clipper Round the World Race. My uncle was one of the crew members on the Hull & Humber yacht, so we thought go and see him arrive back after 10 months sailing around the world.

In the overall race, the Hull & Humber came second, beaten by just a few points by New York. In third place was Glasgow.

The race consists of 10 yachts, each one sponsored by a City. The crew is mostly members of the public (no previous experience required!) who can be either “Round the Worlders” or “Leggers” – the overall race is split into 7 legs, with each leg consisting of a number of races between ports. Points are calculated based on positions in each race, with deductions for any equipment that is replaced.

Technically the overall race finished at midnight on Saturday morning with a “first past the post” elastic race just a few miles outside of Liverpool. Basically towards the end of the final race there were a number of markers which could be added or removed as needed to ensure the boats mostly arrived on time…

We arrived around 10am into Liverpool by train, having found there’s a Merseyrail (Underground) link from Lime Street to James Street, just a few minutes walk from the Albert Dock. Given that the yachts were still a few miles outside of Liverpool, there was a final race (not counted towards the overall race) called the Mersey Dash -  a number of markers bringing the yachts to the finish line at the Albert Dock. Basically the race was to get the boats to the Canning Half Tide dock in time for the tidal level to allow them to safely enter.

After watching the arrival of the yachts, we moved round to the Canning Half Tide dock, where they paraded in in overall race order, led by the host boat Liverpool08.

During the Dash and movement to the Half Tide dock, we were “entertained” by the sports reporter from BBC Radio Merseyside, and whilst he did have interviews with members of the crew, some of music was rather cheesy! (And I still don’t get the relevance of some of the tracks chosen for the arrival of each yacht, which were presumably meant to be representational in some way!)… So there was much waving and cheering from the crowd as each yacht arrived.

Eventually, the 10 yachts made it into the dock do that the gate could be closed and the water level matched to that of the Albert Dock, given that it was going to take several hours, we decided to depart for lunch… as did everyone else I think! The crew’s however would have to wait until they finally landed in the Albert Dock (though they clearly had copious deliveries of beer…).

After lunch we made our way round the the Albert Dock in preparation for the final journey of the yachts and met up again with a number of other family members. After a long time, the yachts eventually started to move into the Albert Dock, this time in reverse order. This process seemed to take an excessive amount of time, however eventually the Hull & Humber arrived into the dock…

Unfortunately, our vantage point wasn’t next to the landing point for the Hull & Humber, so we had to shuffle through the crowds to try and get a better view of the crew and see the presentation of the 2nd Place flag, champagne and all.

Well, this week the roofer finished replacing the roof on our house. It was actually mostly finished the week before, but there’s a single story bit of roofing at the front over the bay windows and front door, and the scaffolding to access the top was resting on it i.e. they had to wait for the scaffolding company to take down the scaffolding before they could finish.

Our roof was suffering from nail fatigue (where the head of the nail rusts through) – hardly surprising given the house was built in the 1930s, before galvanised and copper nails were around. The old slate was also breaking up, which is apparently caused by a lack of roofing felt or torching, and then freeze/defrost cycles. I’d already been up last year and reseated a number of slate, and earlier this year we had a number of slates come down from the edges in high-winds.

We had a couple of quotes for the replacement of the roof, the cost varied dramatically between people, in fact there was a difference of about 3k between the cheapest and most expensive quote we received. I strongly advocate getting at least three written quotes and comparing them carefully.

The company we chose was called Securaroof, who advertise in the local paper. I found the guy who runs the company to be friendly and not pushy when he came out to quote for the replacement. He was also quite happy to give me a couple of options for roofing material. I was impressed that every day during the job, the ground was swept before we returned home – the first day I was wary there might have been nails or shards of slate on the driveway, but everything had been carefully collected.

In terms of roofing material, we opted for a Spanish Slate – La Roca, over a man-made concrete based replacement material. Generally I think that the natural look of the slate is much better than the mechanically cut lines of the replacement products, and though real slate is more expensive than a man-made product, it wasn’t prohibitively so…

So on Saturday evening, we decided to go to Satay in Lye for dinner. Its an Malaysian-Indonesian restaurant on Lye High Street. This is the third time we’ve been, the restaurant itself is quite pleasant with modern decor and the food is excellent quality. On the two previous times we’ve visited, its been quite busy – the first time was Valentines night and was a set menu, the second with a couple of friends and it was very busy. This meant that the food took a very long time to come out – its a good job we weren’t in a hurry! We’ve also ordered take-away before, though only once, and it took a very long time to arrive and wasn’t particularly hot by the time it got to us (we had to microwave some of it to warm it back up).

That said, I’d still recommend people to go there as the food is excellent … when you get it.

This visit however, the restaurant was only about half full and both the service and food were excellent. You seem to get Kurpak Udang (prawn crackers with a spicy tomato/chilli dip), these have always come out shortly after ordering, so in the past despite the long wait, we haven’t starved. The tomato dip is quite pleasant, though can be quite hot. We ordered the lamb and chicken satay starters (swapping half each) which are grilled pieces of chicken of lamb served with a peanut satay sauce. I really like them… however I’m still not sure about the chilled rice cake that comes as part of the starter. For main course, I ordered the Kari Kambing on the recommendation of the serving staff. Its a Malaysian Lamb curry and it was really nice – excellent flavour and the lamb was slowly cooked meaning it was very soft to eat. As accompaniment to the main, we ordered the coconut rice. Its a “Thai” rice, which is a different type of rice to the pilau rice served in curry shops. In terms of price, it has gone up since our last visit (some dishes by £1.50 or so), but even so, it used to be very cheap and now I still think the pricing is quite reasonable. I’d also give it extra points for being a place where they don’t try to rush you out with the bill as soon as you have finished your food.

One other thing to watch out for (and caught us out on our first visit) is that its not licensed – i.e. take your own alcohol. Luckily there’s a mini-supermarket at the other end of the High Street.

Overall, I highly recommend a visit to Satay, particularly if you’d like a change from visiting a Curry house (of which Lye has a number!).

Satay now has a website – www.mysatay.co.uk which has photos of the restaurant and copy of the menu – though at the moment, the prices on the website are the old prices (its gone up), and then the take-away pricing was always different from the “eat-in” pricing, so I wouldn’t assume the pricing is correct.

Yesterday was I spent the day on an ITIL course, “Apollo 13 – An ITSM case experience“. The course was arranged by our central IT quality team.

It was an interesting and amusing day – its not intended as a serious day and you are supposed to have fun learning whilst learning about the principles of ITIL. Basically you get to play part of mission control for the Apollo 13 mission. The aims are to develop business processes and to see how they can help you achieve your business goals in IT provision. How do teams interface and communicate? How can you escalate and track problems? How do you effectively manage change?

I can see how some of the priniciples can be applied to a general IT provision in a University, though in a University, I think you need to be careful not to apply to much metrics-based testing, particularly when you think about problem solving rates and solving times – its all very well solving large numbers of easy problems, but in a University there are likely to be a number of hard problems which take a long time to resolve and these are probably more important to consider, and probably more difficult to assess with metrics.

Well, just before leaving for work this morning, a large SIG roofing lorry arrived to deliver the new slate for my house roof! So we now have 758 slates sitting on the drive waiting for the roofer to come and install.

Now I wonder if I can get him to leave the pallets behind…..

This seems to be a bit of an ongoing thing at the moment… wet weather.

All during the day, it’ll be fine and then around 6pm, it starts to pelt down with rain. And then of course, the soil at the allotment just ends up as one lump of heavy clay. I think its a cunning ploy to stop me managing to dig the plot over!

And why can’t any of the weather sites decide on the weather for the weekend? Though clearly as its a bank holiday, it has to rain.

Beware the agapanthus … Just got back from a week at the Isles of Scilly – it was quite pleasant, if a little breezy! Evidently handling Agapanthus causes an allergic reaction, so my advice is don’t, though they do have pretty blue flowers. Of course they aren’t frost hardy, which means its going to have to live in the Greenhouse over the winter (and no doubt most of the summer!)

We collected our new car this week! Its a Level 3 New Fabia Estate … We ordered Satin Grey, so its officially registered as grey, though it has a distinct blue hue to it.

The trim levels on the New Fabia are coded by number and not by name as in the past (this confused the guy at the insurance company as he tried to insist it would have a name for the trim level). So level 3 is the “top” trim level, though there a number of options you can get added to that (EPS, type pressure monitors ….).

Having had a three-door Focus before, the car seems narrower from the outside, though I don’t feel like there’s any less space inside the vehicle – the Fabia is technically a “SuperMini”, as opposed to the Focus “Small Family Car”, though those names seem entirely random! Given that my drive is quite narrow, the width of the car is quite important to us!

The level 3 estate comes with front fog-lights as standard, there’s an option for “cornering” head lights, though I’m not entirely clear on what the benefit of that is …

On the photo of the dash interior of the car, you can just about make out the MaxiDot display at the centre of the dash display, currently showing a door open on the vehicle. When driving, it gives feedback about the current fuel consumption, you can switch this to give miles left in the tank, journey time and average speed. It also displays the current radio station. I assume it also gives feedback if a fault occurs, though that is probably combined with a warning light elsewhere on the dash, for example the seat belt warning light comes on if one of the front seats is occupied without the belt plugged in.

So, I decided finally to succumb to setting up a blog, and therefore I need to make a first post onto it.

I guess I’ll get bored of writing on it at somepoint, but you never know.