Your day apart from gardening

[Oliver Buckle]

I was never shy, and then I was a bluecoat for a bit when I was about twenty, no room for shy there.
I would love it to 'monetise'. It is nearly all original material and my pension only pays about £10 a day, my partner is too well off to supplement it, but I think chance would be a fine thing. There are 50 or so videos there, so that's only 20 each, on the other hand I do have a couple of fans, there is a lady in California who has watched every one "At least once". That's a lot of watching, A Family Business on its own is a bit over three quarters of an hour long even if some are only three mins.

 

[Sean Regan]

A bit of chore today.

The waste from the basin in the bathroom travels straight down inside its unit to below the floorboards, then travels six feet to the corner of the bathroom and then a further two feet along the side wall collecting the drain from under the shower cubicle before a right angle turn through the side wall of the house and then drains into the box it shares with the downpipe from the roof gutter, (you can just see the box half way up the pipe between the kitchen window and the door), then down another waste pipe to a house drain below it.

Every few years the basin starts to drain slowly. I noticed it this morning, it had been slowing down for the last week or so. I know what it was . It's the build up of liquid soap gunge in the horizontal parts of the pipe. The pressure of the water draining from the small basin doesn't always shift it. No expensive drain cleaning solution will shift it.

So it was the ladder out, (without letting my wife know as I'm 82 and she doesn't like me using the ladder), remove the 90 degree spout in the box and pass the end of a hose up the pipe for the full length of the horizontal bit, turn it on and stand well back! The amount of gunge that came out was "impressively disgusting."

Job done, it cost nothing. Didn't mention what I'd done.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

You are doing well, my missus hates me using a ladder and I am only 77 (78 come September). She insists on 'footing' it, I am never sure whether that makes me safer or puts me in more danger If I can get away with it I do exactly what you do and do it when she is out.

 

[Sean Regan]

You are doing well, my missus hates me using a ladder and I am only 77 (78 come September). She insists on 'footing' it, I am never sure whether that makes me safer or puts me in more danger If I can get away with it I do exactly what you do and do it when she is out.

I may have told this before.
It must be nearly forty years ago when our daughter, our youngest child who was about nineteen and on holiday from her job as a nurse at Great Ormond Street and on a visit. She and her mother were in the lounge.
It was a hot & sunny summer Sunday afternoon. We had patio doors then and they were wide open, but we had floor to ceiling blinds down to keep the sun out. They were just sitting on the sofa talking. I was up on and down a ladder to the roof for several hours. I'd been re-pointing the chimneys and the ridge tiles. I could walk across the roof in a pair of old squash shoes as the tiles are thick concrete with a rough finish so it's easy enough. About three o'clock I'd finished. I'd been using an old plastic bucket to carry up the mortar, so by then it was caked with the stuff. Instead of carrying it down with me, I just chucked it down on the patio, which it hit with a loud bang!

Our daughter said, "Dad's fallen off the roof!"

My wife said, "Don't look!"

 

[Oliver Buckle]

Its funny, I have known people use roof ladders, planks, everything to spread weight, and still knock tiles off. Others can shimmy about all over the roof in a pair of old plimsolls and do no damage at all.

 

[Sean Regan]

Watching the tennis this afternoon on TV.

Noticed this old fella with a sour look on his face in the stands, "trying to look inconspicuous?"
Doubt if goin' on a summer holiday would cheer him up at his age.

 

[Sean Regan]

I've a Sony android TV in my den..alright...our front room.
I rarely speak to it. Often when I do, it doesn't give me the information I want, rather it suggests something you don't want or YouTube videos, many of which are made by people who'd love to be on TV. So take forever to get round to answer one simple question.
Anyway, today, I turned it on and I only had the choice of seven channels, now the same aerial on the roof is connected to two Humax tuner/recorders, under the TV , which were working perfectly and the Virgin Tivo box was equally unaffected.
I tried the "self diagnosis." feature, It did a test and then said "everything was fine.

So I went into "help" to re-tune it. Now this should be a simple job, but no, it sends you all around the houses, asking all sorts of daft questions. It took an age, as on one page I hadn't scrolled down far enough to find a link that said "UK." Clicking on that the option to re-tune came up. So I was able to start it. That took for ever and for three-quarters of the time it hadn't found any, but they all came on in a rush near the end. So job sorted.
Why do they make things so complicated?

With my oldest Humax, to re-tune requires only a couple of clicks on the remote.

 

[Sean Regan]

Standing in an unnecessarily long queue at the checkouts in Tesco this morning (only three checkouts open!) I was next to what was left of their gardening gear display, which had been reduced to clear.

I noticed an own label 8-way hose nozzle for £4, so I put one in my trolley. Then I noticed some Spear & Jackson gardening gloves at £2, or £1 with my Tesco Club Card. So I said "hang the expence" and bought two pairs. They'll come in handy.

 

[Sean Regan]

It was a right pain this morning.

We have a Triton shower in the bathroom. It's a replacement for the same model, I changed five years ago for one that went faulty.

Choosing the same one meant that the fixing screws were in the same place. So no ugly unwanted screw holes in the tiles, or messing with the water supply. Just a question of disconnecting the power and the water supply, removing the old unit and installing the new one. A fifteen minute job. I was able to use the original equipment, support bracket, hose, shower head etc.,

Yesterday I noticed that the plastic brackets that support the pole on which you can slide the head up and down showed signs of cracking. As I'd kept all the equipment that came with the replacement shower, just a case of swopping them over.

Wrong!

In the space of a few years although the shower hadn't changed the way you attached the fixing brackets had. So I had to do a bit of "fettling," to fix it.


Everything is now built "down to a price."

 

[Oliver Buckle]

Got around to taking the wheel off the sack barrow and changing the inner tube. I got a pair of inner tubes for just over £5 , delivered, so I also have a spare now.
Our bathroom is being given a complete makeover, it is taking a while. Today the shower was fitted, tomorrow afternoon we shall be showering. I would almost wish the heatwave were back

 

[Sean Regan]

Collected a couple of watches from Timpsons.
This one I've had for several years, it's a Rotary Dolphin standard, I bought new on eBay.
The vendor must have got the price wrong as I paid less than £50 for it. It's a £200 watch.
It just needed a new battery and strap.

This one needed more work, like a complete new movement and strap.


It's another Rotary, Dolphin standard. I must have had it nearly forty years. It was new and I liked its retro styling the time, as it was very "1930's"

I still like it so it was worth paying the £85 to have it repaired including battery and strap. The gold plating shows no sign of wearing off.

 

[Tincasteve]

Out fishing

 

[Oliver Buckle]

Not exactly gardening, I made two cross struts for a largish garden table that was a bit rickety, then I painted it with some left over shed paint. It won't see me out, but it is solid enough to serve this Summer. Socialising is done outdoors now.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

And today I have at last got around to recording and posting a new video to my Facebook page and to YouTube

There are over 50 stories on there now, most of them are my original stories, but this one is a traditional story, though I add bits.

 

[Sean Regan]

"Sod's law" says that if a domestic appliance is going to fail, it'll do it the most inconvenient time.

"And thus it came to pass" that our oven packed in at 7.00pm last night. It wouldn't heat up, so I guess the element had failed.
Now it wasn't the end of the world as we've a microwave.

The oven is a built-in Baumatic.

It's getting on a bit now. It went wrong about five years ago and it took nearly two weeks for the repair people to get the part. So to tide us over, I bought a Cook's Essentials air fryer, (well my wife ordered it on her favourite shopping channel and I paid for it). We've not used it since the oven was repaired.


I suggested we might as well have a new oven rather than have it repaired again.

These days, you have to look on line as few appliance stores have many built-in ovens on show.

I always find searching on-line a pain, as most sites are more interested in getting you to agree to accept their cookies than take you to what you want to look at. I always have to delete a boat load of them every time I close down my laptop.

You have to be careful when ordering a new oven, as not all single ovens now will fit in the standard aparture which is 56.5cms wide by 58.5cms high.
Anyway, we settled on a Bosch. Searching around I found it 10% cheaper at Curry's than at John Lewis. ("Never knowingly undersold" they announced recently, no longer applies)

It's coming on Thursday.

I turned down Curry' offer to "install it" for £90. It's just three wires for heaven's sake.
I also turned down their offer to take the old one away for twenty quid.
and "an arm and a leg" to extend the two year guarantee.


I took the old one out this morning.
Just a question of turning off the kitchen ring main and disconnecting the cable from the cooker box in the back of the cupboard above it, (remembering to turn the ring main back on!)

Getting an oven out on your own can be tricky, you don't want to damage the housing unit.

When we bought the Baumatic which replaced a Smeg my wife chose, then hated after a couple of years, I made this wooden stand on castors. Used once, it's been doing service in the garage as additional storage for over ten years now.
I made it out of scrap wood, it's exactly the same height as the shelf on which the oven sits. So just a question of standing it up against the unit, sliding the oven out of the housing on to it, then turning it round and taking it out through the kitchen door. Then down to the tip with it, which took all of twenty minutes.

Before I went I examined the controls which showed that they had been considerably affected by the heat over the years so I don't think it would have been worthwhile repairing.
The problem with built in ovens is that you need to get rid of the heat as not all of it comes out of the front vents. It's made more of a problem by people like me who like to box in the tops of their kitchen units. So it's as well to fit a vent like this for the heat to get out that come off the back of the oven. There's an extractor fan in the window three feet away.

Installing the new one when it arrives, should take all of twenty minutes.