Saturday 22 October 2011

A few Saturday jobs while we pray for heating and hot water

The plumber is here. He has been a while. Apparently someone bodged jobs on the boiler before and that's making it all very complicated. I can believe it. It seems to be a pattern in this house.

But being stuck in the house on a lovely sunny October Saturday has meant we've got some jobs done.

I finished our bedroom curtains and added curtain rings. Now we just need to get the curtain pole up.

Jon put up two of the lovely prints that Nell and Paddy gave us a house warming present. Don't they look wicked? These are the first pictures we've put up in the house, exciting!

And we've been thinking about shelves in the kitchen. I had the idea of painting our wooden bookcase. Jon's not convinced yet so I though I'd run it past you. What do you think? Should we put it up as shelves?

maybe above the table?

Or above the radiator?

Thursday 20 October 2011

Not happy


This is a very naughty boiler. First, it decided it was only going to pump hot water to our taps and not our radiators. Second, when the plumber tried to change the pump, it was faulty. Now I'm not going to have hot water until Saturday at the earliest. I am not happy. In fact I'm very sad.

Sunday 16 October 2011

Through the Wardrobe

Another post, another job that Stephen has helped with. Now we are one step closer to bedroom perfection with a clothes rail being installed into the built-in wardrobe.


In other news, this is a photo of our kitchen looking all lovely in readiness for dinner with Tamsin and Camilla. I know the photo is blurry but believe me, it looked lovely!

Monday 10 October 2011

Bed, sorted!

Due to a rather raucous weekend with the crew from Newcastle this post is a bit late. But on Thursday our mattress arrived and finally our bed is complete. And it is amazing!



airing our new mattress, isn't it lovely? What a classy red stripe and perfect tufting.

all ready for bed!

There were also pictures Jon took one night of me asleep in our new bed. These will not be displayed here! Thank God I do the blog and not Jon, it would be full of pictures of me looking awful!

Thursday 6 October 2011

Sunshine, in October!!!!!

Two people need to buy a mattress for their new bed. They've been putting it off forever and whenever they've made it inside a mattress shop it's been impossible to make a choice.

But now we actually have the bed it's impossible to put it off any longer. This weekend we had to buy a mattress. Then October goes and gives us amazing weather. I don't want to be trawling bed shops when it's this sunny. But clever Jon has a plan. He's found some bed shops up in Chingford and we can get there along the Lea! Which means we can combine a lovely bike ride with the necessary shopping.

It wasn't all as easy as it sounds though. First off, out of town bed stores don't have very good bike parking provision, can you believe it! It's almost as if everyone who goes there drives! But the first place had a Halfords too, you would have thought they might have wanted to encourage cycling.

We started off in Benson Beds, after saying we had an absolute maximum budget of £500 the man took us straight to a £750 mattress. When I explained, quite calmly I thought, that our MAXIMUM budget was £500 and queried why it said £500.99 in big letters by the mattress, his boss decided we could buy the whole base, headboard and mattress for £500. THIS IS WHY IT'S SO HARD TO BUY A BLOODY MATTRESS - BED SALES MEN ARE INSANE!

Then we tried Dreams, nice salesmen (and women), one nice mattress, for £750. Why are they all so expensive? This is making John Lewis look reasonable. After they tried to sell us interest free credit (do they not know that I save up if I want to buy something?) we left, deciding to go back to John Lewis. At least we had some vouchers for money off.

But as if a miracle had happened we walked past Feather and Black and went inside. Actually Jon went inside and I stood outside with the bikes - we couldn't be bothered with the faf of chaining them up again. But then the best thing happened, we found a good mattress, that was comfy, that was less than £500 - whoopie!!! So I had to chain the bikes up after all [edit: Jon chained the bikes up and does sometimes read this blog!!].

Gosh, that was a massive post on mattress buying, possibly the most I've ever written on the blog, sorry.

Whilst I have no pictures of mattresses, we did take some pictures along our ride, much more fun.

Can I just clarify, I'm not actually wearing Lycra


lunch by the Lea




Jon's smile looks a little painful

so then when we got home we tidied the room and moved some furniture about. These photos are a bit rubbish though, sorry

we moved the drawers to the other wall

and hid lots of mess under our tall bed - wicked!

Wednesday 5 October 2011

Key cutting

I'm sorry, I can't think of a way to make this post any more interesting than the title suggests. Luckily Jon took these nice solar flare photos to spice things up a bit.



Oh yes, the point of the post. Jon got us some spare keys cut so that Tim and Laura can let me in when I forget my keys next.

Monday 3 October 2011

We get a delivery

What's that space for?


That looks like an interesting package, I wonder what it could be....

IT"S OUR BED!!!!!!!!!!

In a lot of bits


Phew! Tim is here to help put it together (check out my skirtains, embarrassing!)

and Laura, woo!

Make my bed Tim!

with Jon's help of course


oh no! Jon's lost his head!

look! I'm helping too.



nearly done...


FINISHED!!!!

Sunday 2 October 2011

Tidying the crappy outhouse, again

Every time we do some more decorating the outhouse, lean-to thing gets full of junk again as we try to clear various rooms in the house. But after my Dad brought down a useful little book shelf, Jon has emptied a final box in the lean-to and cleared lots more space. Also, my seed box is now accessible so if there's anything that can be planted in October, now I can.