The eleventh week

There's been a lot of non-LTRP activity which I can't be bothered to put in a separate post. For example, I have been to the optician and will be getting new varifocal glasses with stronger near vision assistance. Because of my complex lens prescription I am entitled to an NHS voucher of about £37 towards the cost, which sounds lovely until you find out that the total cost of the specs including free frames is close to £400. Until I needed the varifocals my prescription hadn't changed for many years, so the optician's cheerful comment that my current glasses had lasted for four years was not as well-received as it might be. Only four years!

Musical activity - Lola II, Mr M, Cousin Y and I went to sing karaoke and had a great time. One of the highlights (and there were many) was Lola II's discovery that alongside the traditional karaoke pop songs you could also get Bernard Cribbins' 'Right Said Fred' and Victoria Woods' 'The Ballad of Barry and Freda'. I also took part in the clarinet and saxophone ensembles' Christmas concert, which went very well. Then there were two Christmas dinners, one for work and the other for badminton club 2. Badminton club 1 had a tournament which I was partly responsible for organising, but the formula that had worked so well in previous years went a bit wrong so we kept having to re-write the rules as we went along. And I went to see comedian Tom Allen and the film Paddington 2, but not at the same time, and both were good.

So you'll probably want to know where we are with the LTRP. This week saw a first for Team Ulf - something did not go according to plan. Electrician Ulf was due to visit on Monday to connect the appliances and the last few lights, but I got home at the end of the day and things looked suspiciously similar to how I had left them at the beginning of the day. After some investigation it emerged that Electrician Ulf has a chest infection, but was still hoping to do the job towards the end of the week.

Tuesday brought a new team of two to lay the flooring, whom I am happily naming Blf 1 and Blf 2 now that I have run out of vowels. The Blfs arrived at an unspeakably early hour on my day off, prepared the surface, mixed up the levelling compound, carefully spread it over the floor and left me with full instructions for the following 24 hours.

I got Blf 1 to check the calculation for floor tiles (which I had already bought), and he sent me off on Tuesday to buy some more because it looked very tight and would be fairly disastrous if they ran out. He also told me the story of a big job they had done which for some reason I couldn't quite follow had to be done from start to finish without a break. It had taken 31 hours, at the end of which Blf could barely function and was hallucinating. "They were very grateful," he said. "They put a very nice comment on my website."

The Blfs were gone by 9 a.m., after which I was instructed to wait until the levelling compound had set and then introduce a space heater which would allow all moisture to evaporate before they came again at a similar unspeakably early hour on Wednesday and finished the job. It was a good thing I had bought the extra tiles, because some of them were needed.

Electrician Ulf was well enough to come back on Thursday, and discovered that the hob had been wrongly specified in the plans so that it needed a 32A rather than the 13A supply that had been prepared for it. He managed to run a new cable without having to tunnel through the fresh plaster but it could have been very much more disruptive. I was also delighted to welcome not only Ulf but Sons of Ulf too for a final reunion to finish the stairs, the skirting, door architraves, and rebuild a bit of the garden that had been destroyed. They even put up the airer in the utility although one of the pulleys had completely seized, and generally behaved very generously in doing things that weren't strictly their job. And, with perfect timing, they finished the biscuits.

The kitchen Ylfs have been the least satisfactory of all the tradesmen, some of which was not their fault, but in several respects was simply poorly executed. They made no allowance for the thickness of flooring when fitting plinths so the dishwasher door won't open, the cupboard layout in the utility room makes it all but impossible to reach the stopcock, and the hob specification error was down to Ylf as well. I will be feeding this back to them in the New Year, and I assume they will be coming back to finish up when the replacement parts arrive.

So it's all done just in time for Christmas, except for those few missing pieces of the kitchen installation. Operating the ovens seems extremely complicated, but I have done some grilling (fish fingers) and used the hob (it boils water very quickly indeed). The task of washing everything before it can find a new place in the kitchen is continuing slowly. I only have one casserole dish and one large frying pan that are suitable for the new hob, so buying saucepans will probably be my first task for the New Year. Now I'm off to celebrate Christmas and then do some walking over the New Year. I wonder which LTRP project I shall take on in 2018?

December 2017