Last snags

Carnivorous plants at the Krakow Botanical Garden, July 2016

Now that most of the LTRP (Kitchen Instalment) is done, I've returned to my previous dilatory habits, and the frequency of blog posts seems to have returned to previous levels. However, I was delighted to spend my first weekend in the new kitchen, although I'm still cleaning utensils and deciding where to put things. The new saucepans are wonderful, but the ovens are somewhat harder to operate than they should be.

It turns out that I keep a surprising amount of stuff in the kitchen, but I'm weeding out a few bits and pieces. One new project I'm thinking about is to sell stuff in the local car boot sale. One of my badminton-playing friends regularly attends a car boot to sell his plants, so I'll have a look when the 'season' starts in May.

Last Tuesday was fully booked with the boiler due for a service, building inspector coming for the final sign-off, laundry to do and hoping to go for a walk with a friend. The boiler man was first and he was a delight - very enthusiastic about my brand of boiler and showed me how to deal with error codes. Then he helped me move a sofa from the living room into the kitchen.

When the building inspector hadn't turned up by lunchtime I phoned the department, where an idiot of a man wasted quite a lot of time by looking up addresses that weren't mine but eventually said that there was no record of any scheduled visit. So I made another booking for next Tuesday, but by this time it was too late for a walk because of the requirement to do laundry when I took the opportunity of washing all the sofa covers too.

I got a call from the kitchen Ylfs to say that all the missing parts had arrived, and Team Ylf could either visit on Friday or not until February. So on Friday they made more dust and finished constructing cupboards and the sink in the utility room, plumbed in the washing machine and adjusted the plinth below the dishwasher so its door would open. They were unable to come up with an answer to the problem of the inaccessible stopcock.

After they went I celebrated with a load of laundry and a load of dishes, but discovered that the hot water pressure in the utility room is too low for the tap to work properly. I don't know if this is a problem with the tap itself, the installation or the plumbing behind it, so I have contacted all parties to ask them for their suggestions.