My Website

It's been an entertaining time in the garden this week, Take a look at these two pictures and see if you can tell why...

Did you spot the difference?

Yep next door finally decided to have the tree cut down, about time to because the ammount of leaves and branches that use to fall off it when ever we had some strong leaves was rediculous and muggins here had to pick them up all the while to!

Well no more :-)





Thought I would just put this one up incase anyone was wondering what it was on top of my shed, Well it's the low wattage solar panel I installed to power the lights in the shed and water feature at the bottom of the garden. Will be even better when I get round to wiring them up instead of charging the batteries for no reason! But thats another day...

There's been lots of updates and changes to the website laterly, Most have been hidden and locked behond closed doors but the best one in the newly updated Guest Map.

It is based on google map technology and lets you add a pin to the map with your name and short comment, *** hint, hint ***

I have also been working on the Photo Galleries pages, and although i can't say for sure it will stay the same (or there for long!) there is a glimpse of the new gallery system available here *** Click Me ***.

And you all thought i'd been getting pissed all this time! Shame on you! :p

Thought I would have a play on the Act on Co2 website and see what my Co2 footprint is.

Click on the above image for a full size picture!


I was surprised to find that I was less than half of the national average! See what your is and leave me your comments....

A little while ago I decided it was about time I tidied up the garden a bit, get it ready for a nice hot summer (yeah right!) and a few evening BBQ's etc...

So I've bought a nice new wooden table and chairs and also splashed out a bit on a three jug water feature (calm down lads it's not what you think).

The plan is to install a solar array on top of the shed that will evenually power the water feature and a light inside the shed, Horray!!! I've only been meaning to get power up there since I moved in seven years ago.





The plan is quite simple, There will be a 18w solar panel on top of the shed connected to a power regulator that will charge some 12v batteries (thinking in the range of about 70Ah), This should be enough to power the water features pump and lights (all 12v) and a 12v 8w lamp inside the shed. I am hoping that because the water feature and shed light won't be on all the time that the solar panel will charge the batteries up enough that I can also run an inverter that will give me enough mains power to also mow the lawn and trim the edges.

Hmmm that might me a bit to far but hey if I don't try I'll never know.

Can't you tell when it's a bank holiday weekend?, Unfourtantly the call out rota at work rostered me on for this weekend and what would normally take an hour to drive, took nearly three!.

One small accident on our motorways and both carriage ways seem to grind to a complete halt, But the worse part about being on callout on a bank holiday weekend is knowing that your've also got to go back in the other direction when the job is complete, and you can see how many miles thats backed up for.

*** End of moaning for now! ***

Friday

It's been a busy weekend in my house as I have finally gotten round to doing some more work in the bathroom, I've been putting it off and off and off mainly blaming it on the expected delivery date for the bath which was on Friday.

Friday came and then I had no more excuses to fall back on so out came the tools and on went the work cloths and of course the hammer!, I had the day off work on Friday and as they nicely delivered my new bath at an early enough time i decided that i should make a start strait away (that and the fact i didnt really want two baths hanging around the house for to long.)

It amazed me how much rumble and stuff had been left there from when the bath had originally been installed, But nice me has cleaned all that away now.

I'm not sure if you can see from the photos above but it got me wondering how my bath every emptied, I'm sure it must all be down to gravity etc and forcing the water down a small plug hole but the reason i mention this is that after the water trap under the plug hole, the waste pipe was actually positioned in a humped bridge motion up and down then up again (where the wood support is) then finally down and around the corner to the soil pipe.

This was corrected when i refitted the new bath with a new trap and an angled joint at the wall end of the pipe so now all that waste water runs down hill to the soil pipe after the new trap.








I was proud of my new bath after all i hadn't really done anything on this scale before especially by myself, On this high i even contemplated diving straight into the sink but eventually decided to put my feet up, crack open a Carling and cook some food on the BBQ instead.


Saturday

Now it was time to tackle the sink so out it came and I thought it would be a good idea to strip all the old paint off the copper water pipes before fitting the new pedistal and basin. OMG that took longer than i expected! after a ton of little steel splinters from the steel wool (very good invention) my pipes looked pretty good. See for yourself in the photos below.








I left the paint on the top parts of the pipes to show what they were like before.

After some jiggery pokery with the pipes it all finally came together looking like this....





Im really quite pleased with how it's all gone so far, only the new toilet and plastering and tiling and decorating to go, Why did i talk myself in to this??





Do you like the new taps? (Part 3 coming soon)

Now that i have decieded not to sell the house I thought it about time to spruce the place up a bit and do a few jobs that i've wanted to do for a while like, Fitting an extractor fan in the kitchen, and redecorating (complete with pottery as they didnt all match) the bathroom.

I had already pre-arranged and ordered some stuff to be delivered whilst i was on leave so have been planning these 3 days for a little while but best laid plans and all that seldom work out.

The new toilet and sink turned up last Thursday even though i expressly said about delivery on the 21st, The new vertical blinds that i ordered for all the windows in the house again attempted delivery on the Thursday, but best out of three i guess the wickes order was still on for the Monday, mainly because i didnt order it until the Friday knowing it would be next working day delivery.

Monday came and the first of my deliverys arrived, It was the reattempted delivery of my blinds that i had rearraged for the Monday even though i originally requested a Monday delivery, Don't you just love it when companies actually take the time to do things to your timescale instead of their own? So as you have probably guessed most of my Monday was then taken up by fitting the new blinds instead of kitchen or bathroom stuff as originally planned for, Second to be delivered was some work wear and my new tile cutter that i ordered off the internet, For those of you that have never used an electric tile cutter I really urge you to try out the next time your doing any tiling!, I borrowed Dee's dads when we were tiling the Kitchen, It made everything so much easier.

And lastly my order from Wickes was delivered late in the afternoon, Now this order contained a lot of the stuff needed to move forward with the Bathroom refit, namely some skim and PVA to recover the walls now that i have removed the badly fitted and aligned tiles from the previous owners, If only it was that easy... My stuff was on the picklist but not in the box! well not all of it anyway..... NO skim! the one thing i really need to level out the walls, that need to dry for atleast 2 weeks pre painting and re-tiling! the one part of the order that i really wanted for my 3 days off work.

A few emails later and nearly 2 days for a reply, Yes was Thursday before they replied and the missing parts of my order will be reshipped, maybe in 2 to 3 days! Thanks a lot!

Well after Monday my 3 planned days of DIY had turned to dust, So in an attempt to rescue the remaining 2 days of time away from work i decided to fit the extractor fan in the Kitchen.

This went better than expected and with a bit of help from any DIYers best mate filler! it is all looking good, even better than that though......... It actually works also! not bad for a £10 purchase off Ebay hey?

Now moving on over to the bathroom and day 3 of my leave, Well its the only day i have left to get done what i wanted to get done, that changed slightly as i decided not to fit the new basin and pedistal just yet as im not convinced i would get the bath out (delivery on the 9th May) with the basin in place and couldnt see the point of fitting it twice, Does that make sence or is that just me?

What i haven't mentioned yet is that my works car has been playing up for a week or 2 (will be another post on this shortly) so had been arranged for the garage to collect it today and a hire car delivered so i wasn't carless, NO NO NO! nothing else has gone right over these 3 days so why would this part be any different?

The hire car was delivered but my car wasnt picked up, And that sort of killed my third and final day of annual leave. I managed to get the rest of the tiles off the walls and some of the plasterboard work done but no toilet fitted and no PVA splashed on the walls meaning no skim (which hasn't been delivered yet) on the walls.

All in all a complete waste of 3 days off work, Am i happy? well i did have a beer or two...

Last Wednesday evening the radiator in the bathroom started to leak, I was quite lucky to be honest as I was on call last Wednesday and had just been called out prior to finding the leak.

In fact I had already left my house to start my journey down the M1 to the call out when the fault desk rang me to cancel the call (which turned out to be a good thing!), When i returned home is when i found the leaking radiator which could have been disastrous if I had carried on my hour and half journey to Luton, and my hour and a half journey back again leaving the radiator to leak for atleast another 3 hours or so!.

I quickly turned off the radiator valves to stop the leak and thought nothing more of it till the next day.

Offending radiator with caps off to stop the leak

One of the problems I have with my house as I found out last year when I had to change a different radiator, Is that everything is in imperial measurements and today I can only buy a replacement radiator in metric measurements. This has made finding a replacement radiator a bit tricky as the off the shelf ones down the local wholesale are either way to short or way to wide, and typically I don't really want to mess around with the piping to much so, I've found a wholesaler on the internet thats got one in metric pretty much to my size! Yeh!!! just gotta wait for delivery now!



Before you say anything I didn't do the tiling!

To add to my problems I found another fault with the bathroom radiator this afternoon, Yep another fault! The inlet value had started to leak!

Now i don't mind plumbing to be honest, It's quite satisfying when your've finished it off and theres no leaks or anything, But i could of done without this this evening!. Off I set downstairs to turn off the boiler, Then upstairs to turn off the water inlet value which is convienantly located in the attic???, Cut a lengh off of my garden hose pipe and drained the upstairs of the heating system and then changed the value.

Like I said before I don't really mind plumbing but I was planning to only do this once, And I was always going to change the values on the radiator when I fitted the new one but, I only had one value to hand as I've ordered 2 new ones to be delivered with the radiator, So i changed the faulty/leaking one, Topped up the system and aired out the radiators always knowing that i will have to do it all again when the new radiator turns up!.

After all this I also decided to find out exactly how bad the leak was in the radiator so I started to chip back the paint work a little thinking it was only a pin prick or something in the metal work, My surprise when I saw just how bad it was.



The radiator is upside down so thats the bottom not the top.

I am starting to see how lucky I was that i discovered this leak when I did.

I have been spending a lot of time down at the National Distribution Centre (NDC) laterly, I like the NDC but it's always a pain trying to work on the CCTV as you can't get behind the units.

Ok so you can't really tell that thats me! but you have my word for it, They are my legs dangling there! Not to sure that the work trousers are really that flattering though?

For those of you that dont travel up and down the M1 motorway virtually everyday then here is a piccie of the Royal Mail hub just off of J18.



Click picture to enlarge in a different window.

The place i like to call second home *smile.