Double glazing, continued Part Deux The Return

Aha! I got a phone call from the double glazing company. The boss had told his staff to say he was out on Friday. He told his workman not to turn up to me today. I understand schedules and appointments, I really do. I don't understand their inability to pick up the phone - when I said a version of that to him, politely, he said "we have to move on from this". Which is code for "you've got us bang to rights"....

Their reputation has suffered serious damage with me, to the extent that when I get the rest of the house double glazed, I don't know whether or not to ask them to be one of the companies that quote. Of course, maybe they don't want repeat business - but you'd think they'd want word of mouth. Its all very puzzling. I'm self employed, and I know that if I ran my business like that, I'd simply run it into the ground.....

The new-new appointment isn't till the middle of next week, so we'll see.

Double glazing, continued Part Deux

Well, this is all getting a bit sad. Double glazer turned up just as my client arrived - stuck in traffic, he said. My client travelled further, and arrived on time. Glazer promised faithfully to ring around 7am Tuesday morning (this morning), he'd do the tiny little leftover job first thing. He hasn't.

To add insult to injury, the admin bloke from the firm rang yesterday afternoon - a bank holiday! - to check everything was okay. I explained the situation, and he said, oh, its all fine then. Mmmmm.... my response was "well, if it happens, its fine". Am I prescient, or wot?

At the office, the only person who can make decisions is engaged. After being unavailable for three phone calls on Friday afternoon. Anyone would think he didn't want to speak to me :(

Double glazing, continued

All *may* be well - the double glazing firm doesn't really understand that trapping carpet beneath a double glazing sill isn't a good idea, but they *do* understand that I don't like it, and they've agreed to turn up tomorrow to fix it. Fingers crossed.

Double glazing

Yesterday, I had two merry men working on my front door, the windows on either side of it, and the kitchen window. I now have secure double glazing! The previous frames, which no longer closed securely, are gone, and I'm happy happy happy about it. I have a FENSA certificate. The glass is kite-marked. Come winter, my hall will not be freezing - not quite so freezing, anyway, as the porch is solid walled, and the mortar on the rest of the house isn't good enough to allow for cavity wall insulation yet.

There is one fly in the ointment, however: I was going on (and on and on) to the head bloke about not leaving any voids behind the fascias .... and on the windows, he hasn't. But you know the protective internal step immediately in front of a door? Thats been laid on top of the carpet. He'd said he'd be repairing the concrete floor, because he had to take out the whole frame of the door, of course, and the concrete needed to be touched up. But really, to put the last bit of the doorframe, the fabric of the house, over a piece of carpet? A piece of really naff, dirty carpet, I might add, which is going to the skip next week, as my builder is booked in next Thursday?

I've been putting off the phone call this morning, but I have to make it. Still, my double glazing is very beautiful, very minimalist, and easy to use. Mostly-happy bunny here.

An oven thermometer....

And exactly how is that green, I hear you ask? Buying stuff? Well, it *does* make sense. I'm keeping the oven that was here before I moved in - its fairly modern, its certainly still on sale. But its already been pretty well used, or the accessories are *really* cheap, because the markings on the dials have been rubbed off, and also there are two or three different heating elements to use within the oven itself. These two things together make it *impossible* for me to know what temperature the thing is at, so I'm hoping that once I get the thermometer, which has had good reviews on Amazon, Ovenz R Eeezy will become my nickname :)

I *very* nearly bought a halogen oven a while back, to tell the truth - this fitted one that I'm waffling about is a range cooker. "Ooh lovely" people said, when I told them. "Not when you're a single person", I replied sadly - and truly, unless I batch cook in the severest way, the thing is a complete dinosaur. So, when I know how to use the thermometer, I will finally, finally experiment with batch cooking.

There are two shelves, as well as the bottom of the oven itself, of course, and the shelves themselves are twenty two inches wide, so I'm pretty sure two normal baking trays can go side by side. So, regular batch cooking, which saves money and time and will also help me nutritionally somewhat, given that I'm currently eating hardly any onions, for instance, or anything that can't be bought as a frozen vegetable, oops, apart from a few salady bits.

So, typical easy-cook oven dishes for a vegetarian who's gluten intolerant and cow's dairy intolerant (life is difficult sometimes, lol!):
- jacket potatoes.
- crumble, sweet or with a savoury sauce.
- bean stew.
- quorn sausages
- lentils and rice (classic combo - has the protein equivalent of steak).
- vegetarian bolognaise-type sauce.
- possibly pies - but there's rolling involved :( crumbles are easier :)

My fantasy is to be able to cook my own gluten free bread, even once a month would be a real treat.

Compost holder in the kitchen

This has been an inner source of turmoil for me for many years ROTFLMAO.... I like composting my stuff, but I'm basically quite lazy. So I dislike washing out my compost holder.... but letting it get dirty (and mouldy, oops) by continued re-use is not good, washing it is annoying, and letting it take space in the dishwasher (now that I have one) is almost as bad.

Solution: use a strong plastic bag that a food item has been packed in! Oats, pasta, breakfast cereal, you name it, they come in a strong plastic bag that can take a few days of stuff intended for the compost bin, they can probably be reused, and they can be thrown away without bothering to wash them! They probably need to sit on a plate, true, but I can usually room in the dishwasher for a single plate....

I'm a very happy bunny right now :)

Burgess Hill Recycling Tip

I was at the tip yesterday, my second run there in a fortnight, and while I was waiting for my sister to return from her own escapades there, I was looking at the huge piles of *stuff* opposite the places where members of the public actually dump their recyclables. I must have been looking very pensive, because a staff member came up to me and asked - well, I wish I could remember the exact words he used, because it was beautifully put.

I replied something like, I was wondering when we got to be a society who had so much to throw away..... and he was lovely. He pointed out what each pile was - the stuff that would go to the new recycling plant, the earth and green materials that would be chipped or composted, and the waste that would go to the incinerator to provide electricity.

The pile that just goes to landfill was out of sight, but as he said, its getting smaller and smaller all the time.

I left much happier!

Not sure about how green this one is either ....

I'm seeing a theme. My conscious theme is trying to really take care of my standard of living in this house, as well as the house itself, so I'm doing things like installing the right lightpull, i.e. one that I like. It took ages - to look around and find what I liked, to buy it when it wasn't in stock and I couldn't order it, to find time to unpack it and look at it properly, to figure out how to thread the string through a tiny hole and have a nice finish still ....

And I did all that, and thought, well, its not particularly green. But it *is* what I wanted, and on my ordinary online diary, several people have come on to mention that they'd been going through the same process.

Any green manufacturers of lightpulls out there?

Green renovation is hard when you're "desperate"

Good lord its hard to spell "desperate".

Anyway, my desperation is of the house variety. At Easter, I went away for a family wedding - and I had to leave the house by the back door, as the front door wouldn't shut properly without a kick from the inside. Its a very old double glazed door, and I thought it would last until I had the money to get the whole house double glazed, but no, 'twas not to be. Then the kitchen window wouldn't close properly.

Now, I'd like to have the time to research properly the firms that will do timber-based double glazing - of course, I'd like to have the money to pay for them too. I *do* have the money to pay for bog standard uPVC goods, and thats what it'll have to be. The only thing I'm going to splash out on is a retractable fly screen over the kitchen window, which I reckon is worth losing the hassle of chasing stuff out of the kitchen while keeping a lovely cool breeze.