auctions and kettles

So, those are the photos I should have taken the other day.  You'll notice we are carefully co-ordinated - not many people have colour co-ordinated router table and cooker you know!



Our auction purchases.  We bought the window
frame ages ago at another auction.  £10 for
an oak window frame, what a bargain - Bob'll
be having posh windows in his workshop!

 Yesterday and today have mostly been taken up with a timber auction.  Yesterday the viewing where we spent ages trying to work out which lots we were interested in and, just as importantly, how much we'd be happy to pay.  It's all quite awkward - for instance there was a lot of flooring and some of it would have been good for in the lounge.  There were several lots of about the right size, but the one we liked best was after the others, so do you risk not getting anything by bidding for the earlier lots or risk buying the second choice and missing out on the favourite?  As well as flooring, we were looking for timber to make the internal doors and oak for some window frames.  This morning there were laods of lots before the ones we were interested in, but we watched all of them to get a feel for the prices things were going for.  The solid oak boards went for a very reasonable price, there was very little interest in the smaller strip flooring boards and they didn't even bother to go through them all because no-one was bothered.  This all boded well for us getting a bargain, or so we thought.  When it came to the lots we were interested in, the engineered oak boards (oak backed with ply which is far more stable on top of underfloor heating), suddenly people decided to pay much more and we didn't even bother bidding.  Not to worry, we got more than enough chunky oak for the window frames at a very good price . . . . . and also some planks of beech, not sure what we will do with them, but at £20 if we make cupboard doors and paint it it's cheaper than pine!



Bob having another beer to celebrate the
liberation of another piece of our furniture!



Yesterday we unearthed our table - piled on top were hundreds of leaves, cobwebs and dust as well as numerous pictures which we'd wrapped in bubblewrap and plastic and which the mice have just about unwrapped for us.  Luckily, it looks as though they were only interested in popping the bubblewrap and not in nibbling the pictures.  I'd forgotten how heavy the table was, even with the top separate from the legs.  Bob and I made this table together in my dining room very early on in our 'together stage'.  Even back then we could picture it in our cottage - just the details of the cottage we couldn't picture.  It is actually a bit big for the space we have for it - someone's put a whacking great post in the middle of the floor!  We tried it in several positions, but it definitely looks best this way on, we'll try and get it so you can get down the wall side without having to pull it out, but if not we'll have it like this for everyday use and pull it out when we need to, but we really need it to be a bit smaller, so . . . .

. . . . Bob took the saw to it today!  How drastic is that?!  When we made it someone told us it was a good idea to attach a piece of wood across each end to tidy it up.  Trouble is, wood shrinks and in a centrally heated house the boards running lengthwise shrunk crosswise and the end pieces ended up sticking out (make sense?).  Several times Bob had to sut some off and he said several times he was going to cut them off completely.  Now, when we got the table out yesterday, the end pieces were way too short because the lengthwise boards had expanded in the damp atmosphere.  So that's what he's doing in this picture.  Now that the edges are rounded off, it looks fine.  He has had to do a bit of jiggery-pokery where the biscuits were.  Biscuits are little oval pieces of compressed beech - you cut a groove in both pieces to be joined and glue the biscuit in to strengthen the joint.  Of course half of each biscuit showed and so he has routed them out and replaced them with slivers of bog oak - all shows part of the history of the table.

And here's another addition to the kitchen - a whistling kettle.  We've been looking for one we liked for ages.  There are loads we liked the look of, black cast ones, but you just wouldn't be able to lift them with water in they are so heavy!  We need another cold snap so we can light the woodburner and try it out.  No, actually we don't want a cold snap because we really must get these solar panels working properly.  We're back to having showers in the caravan again.  The plumber came on Thursday and made some adjustments and they have only managed to get the water in the tank to 38 degrees since - well that's no good is it?  He also fixed another leak, you know the novelty is wearing off a bit - we've used a whole kitchen roll in our leak checking activities!  I'm still not convinced that we are leak-free and so I expect he'll be back.  This means that the washer can't go in it's slot in the utility which in turn means we can't get on with the work top on the other wall.

We took the copper shower rail to the powder coaters on Friday and they have a batch of mid-sheen black being done on Monday so they'll put it in with that for a tenner - not bad!  We've installed our water softener.  It is an electronic one, so no salt or filters to replace.  It plugs in and you wind two wires in opposite directions around the copper pipe near the rising main.  It creates an electronic field in the water which does something to the water which means the minerals don't build up as scale and stick to things.  It also gets rid of scale in an existing system, but I guess we shouldn't have that problem yet.