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.

I've always agreed with, and often campaigned for, green causes, but applying it all to the place I live in has been much more difficult than I thought. The amount of research seems to be *ridiculous*. So this is what I'm actually doing, as opposed to researching.

In a new-to-you house, the priorities are making a cup of tea and getting somewhere to sleep set up. That much, I think we all agree on. And after that, there are a million pathways to what makes us happy!

For me, it was unpacking books (with four full height sets of bookshelves in a small 3 bed semi, having the books on the floor was a nightmare of *epic* proportions). Then it was setting up the room that I work from at home - work is what enables me to keep the bills paid, after all. Then it was getting the toilet built and the electrics renovated - the first gave me privacy in my living room if clients needed to use the loo, and the second stopped my house from burning down in the night. Thats always a good thing.

Then, it was just getting through the winter and getting well. Lately, its been preparing for a family wedding. Right now, I've been trying to set the garden to rights a little bit - I have an elderly buddleia with a rotten trunk, so I now have dead branches strewn all over the little garden, which I'm clearing away. The man down the road is a ranger for the local wildlife association, and he has a woodburner in his house! He's going to take the trunks, which are fine to burn.

On the bright side, the buddleia seems to be putting forth new leaves :) buddleias are happy plants, even very old ones. And I now have the freedom to paint/protect the wooden fence.

On the other side of the garden, protecting the fence has become more important than ever, as I'm chopping back overgrown ivy thats obstructing my route to the back garden proper, and in chopping it back, I'm exposing areas where its pulled the top protective layer of wood away from the fence panel. Dee-dah, dee-dah,sirens blaring - Casey Greenpath to the rescue with her pot of paint :)

And then, finally, all the little plants I brought with me from my previous house can put their toes in the soil again! More happy plants!

What this tells me about being green, actually, is that maintenance is just as important in being green as spiffy new projects. If I maintain what I have carefully and well, I don't need to chuck everything out and start again. And whether thats nurturing a buddleia or a fence post, it applies. Oh my god, wisdom, of a kind anyway. I think I may faint.

And now ... the Good Life beckons. In future posts, I'll be going through the rooms, looking at the options, and seeing how green I can be.