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I
realise that it has been nearly two months since I last posted a blog
and you must all be wondering what has happened – well, perhaps one
or two of you, anyway. The truth is that I have been 'over-wintering'
in Cheltenham and it has been pretty quiet and uneventful.
In
mid-January I ventured down to soggy Somerset to spend a long weekend
with Jeni in her new home in the centre of Wells. It's a lovely
little cottage set back behind the street in a courtyard which is
accessed via an anonymous green door so, although it is centrally
situated, there is very little traffic noise and it is quite a
peaceful oasis. In fact, she has far more garden than I had
originally realised, so we made a trip up to my paddock where I knew
there were some pots and gardening tools in the old caravan that we
could liberate. Barry had started lambing the day before so we had a
little look at the new lambs while we were there, and I walked the
perimeter of my field to check that the boundaries were in good
order. I noticed that the fruit trees and blackcurrant bushes that we
planted several years ago were still in evidence amongst the
overgrown area that used to be my vegetable patch – I wonder if
they will transplant at a later date?
Jeni
and I decided, after thirty years of living in the area, to go and
see the starling flocks at dusk. We checked at which reserve they had
been seen most recently (on the starling watch website) and headed
off towards Westhay, only to find two men in a council lorry putting
up bollards and 'Road Closed' signs – the road to the reserve was
under water! Determined to see some starling action we turned round
and went to another reserve where we witnessed a mini starling event
all of our own. Even with only a couple of thousand birds (at a
guess) it was an amazing sight as they swirled over our heads,
backwards and forwards, before suddenly dropping into the reeds for
the night.
Back
in Cheltenham I turned my attention to Mum's kitchen. We had tried,
unsuccessfully, to persuade her to have a new kitchen fitted, with
cupboards that were more easily accessible than the ones she had but,
as a compromise to making her life easier, she did agree that a
split-level cooker would be a good idea so that she didn't have to
bend down so far to access the oven. We had a look in Homebase, and I
did some research on the internet, and discovered that standard oven
housings were all going to be too high to fit under the existing
Xpelair extractor fan, and this was the only place that we could fit
it. We were told of a local bespoke kitchen and bedroom firm that
would build a special unit for us but when the quote came in we were
staggered at the price – nearly £1000 just for the oven housing
and a framework for the hob, and that didn't include the appliances!
So, always up for a practical challenge, I decided to build it
myself.
I
started the project at the beginning of February by going on a
fact-finding tour of the various DIY outlets in Cheltenham, finally
deciding that Wickes was far and away the best bet in terms of price
and stock levels. However, it was going to cost me the best part of
£50 to get the MDF sheets and timber delivered across town – a
distance of about five miles, and my initial purchase of materials
was not going to come to much more than that. Then I remembered that
my little Peugeot 206 has a useful facility – the front passenger
seat squab is removable, allowing the back of the seat to fold flat,
thus increasing the overall load length. I needed to transport sheets
of MDF that were 2.4 metres long, in theory this was now a
possibility, but my heart was in my mouth as the sales assistant and
I manoeuvred the sheets into the back of the car. Amazingly, they
fitted and I saved myself a £50 delivery charge – excellent. If
they hadn't fitted I would have had to face the ignominy of returning
to the store, buying a saw and cutting up the sheets in the car park,
in full view of the ubiquitous burger van!
Back
at base I took up residence in the garage and workshop and, with a
jigsaw and battery-operated screwdriver/drill borrowed from a
neighbour, I started the project. Even though I was brought up in the
age of Imperial measurements, I felt that I should embrace the metric
concept on this project, as all building materials and fixings,etc
are sold in metric. However, I do not have a naturally retentive
brain for figures and the large numbers involved soon had my head
reeling. I went along with the old saying of 'measure twice, cut
once' but probably measured half a dozen times just to check that I
hadn't transposed any figures. I decided to pace myself; firstly, to
protect my arthritic thumb joints, which took an instant dislike to
power tools, and secondly, to minimise the risk of brain overload
caused by too much mental arithmetic! Consequently, I only worked for
a couple of hours each day but spent the best part of an hour, when I
first woke up, planning my next moves and worrying that I had bitten
off far more than I could chew.
I
built the framework for the hob first, out of planed timber that
would have been 2” x 2” in the olden days. Once I was satisfied
that the hob would fit in, I cut some tiles that vaguely matched the
existing wall tiles, and tiled the framework, as there was no way
that I could match the original Formica worktops that had graced the
kitchen for the previous 30-odd years.
Next
I turned my attention to the oven housing and started the
construction. Originally I was going to put a cupboard under the oven
but, part way through, realised that two deep drawers, that Mum could
store saucepans in, would be far more useful for her, especially if
they opened right out to minimise bending down and reaching. Back to
Wickes, but here they let me down as they didn't do drawer runners,
of the type I wanted, in-store, so off I went to Homebase and bought
some heavy-duty, ball-bearing runners that would do the job.
I
have to point out here that there was nothing elegant about the
construction of this unit – no dovetail or mortice-and-tenon
joints, just plastic right-angled blocks and lots of wood screws. I,
essentially, created my own flat-packed unit on the floor of the
workshop and then asked mum's long-suffering neighbour if he could
give me a hand to lift it upright. Until this point I had no idea if
the oven would even fit into the housing ,so it was with huge relief
that he and I lifted the oven into position and discovered, apart
from one small easily-solvable problem, that it fitted exactly! I
even braved putting the spirit level across the unit and found it to
be exactly plumb in all dimensions – that was until I got the gas
man to help me lift it into the kitchen after he'd plumbed in the hob
unit, and discovered that the kitchen floor had a dip in it and one
side was several millimetres lower than the other. As I'd planned the
top of the unit to be in-line with the top of the existing tiles, the
resultant discrepancy was horrifyingly obvious, more so as it was at
eye line. Being ever-so-slightly-OCD, I knew that I would never be
able to enter Mum's kitchen again unless I sorted this out, and ended
up cutting a small sliver of wood and glueing it to the short side to
rectify the situation.
The
electrician (a young woman, I was pleased to see) duly came and
re-routed the electrical wiring and wired in the new oven, but this
left a gaping hole in the tiled wall behind the hob, where the cooker
socket used to be so, back onto the internet I went and ordered two
made-to-measure stainless steel splashbacks – one to go on the wall
and the other to protect the side of the oven housing.
The
final hurdle to be overcome was the making of the drawers. I knew
they were going to be tricky before I started, but they were a lot
trickier than even I had envisaged in my early morning
worrying/planning hour. The measurements had to be millimetre perfect
– too small and the drawers would fall off the runners, too large
and they wouldn't fit at all, and I am not very accurate with a
jigsaw. However, after a few curse words and the suggestion that Mum
should go out and visit a friend for the afternoon, I managed to get
two carcases that more or less fitted. The base of the drawers was
difficult as I had no means of checking right angles so had to assume
(wrongly, as it turned out) that the machined edges of the MDF would
form a right angle and work from that. In the end I did construct
two, slightly wonky, drawers that work as they should and the job, as
of today, is finished! I know I didn't charge Mum any labour but the
materials were a quarter of the estimate we were given and, in the
words of Hercule Poirot, it has 'exercised my little grey cells' so a win-win situation!
With
the sudden improvement in the weather at the end of February and the
lighter mornings I have felt the urge to 'be on my way' getting
stronger, so it was good to get a final opportunity to work outside
with the Cheltenham Tree Group, planting out the new saplings in the
tree nursery, a couple of weeks ago. Working in pairs, we had to
plant nearly 200 saplings in rows – my partner and I planted two
rows containing 24 Hornbeam saplings – and all the trees were
planted in just over an hour on a fine, crisp Saturday morning.
In
a week's time I will be on my way to Cornwall, at the start of my
WWOOFing year, and hope to help with some lambing before too long –
Spring is definitely here!
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| Planting the saplings |
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