Being Productive

Well this has certainly been a productive week - we have produced lots of rubbish!  Actually the rubbish was already here and now a lot of it is not!   One of the things we are having done with the kitchen improvements is to fit a TV aerial socket in the kitchen - our roof aerial is currently connected in the lounge but we want a socket in the kitchen as well - since the UK switched to digital the reception on the portable via an internal aerial is pretty useless.

To be able to do that means taking a wire down from the lounge into the cellar - under the floorboards and across to the kitchen.  Actually it's a pretty simple job - now that we have cleared the rubbish from the cellar!  The cellar extends underneath the hallway and lounge but only part of it can be walked in.  The other part is a ledge that is about 3 feet higher than the ground level and 3 feel below the lounge floor level.  The ledge had lots of rubbish on it - you know the sort of thing - offcuts of wood, etc, those things you keep - just in case you might need them one day!  Some of it was left by the previous owners, such as a bath panel and an overhead drying rack amongst other things.  No way could we expect someone to go crawling around that to sort out the wiring.  So the rubbish had to go.

It was a horrible job but the cellar is already looking so much better.  We had accumulated lots of other stuff too like tins of paint - kept for when you need to do that bit of touching up!  Well as most of the tins hadn't been touched in years I didn't think we were likely to start using them now - especially as I'm on a mission to get lots of decorating done.

We're fortunate that our dump/tip (or civic amenity centre as it's also known) takes all household rubbish for free and there are various collection points for wood, paint, recyceable goods so we've made a few trips there this week and hopefully not too much has had to end up in landfill.  That's the royal we of course!  I've been once and then only because it was on the way to somewhere else. Nick's done the trips but then I did venture onto the cellar ledge to pass out the stuff - it was very dusty down there so we're about even.

As to our other tasks for the week, we both had a clean bill of health from the dentist but both need new glasses as our prescriptions have changed.  The car also had a pain free service - nothing needed doing and as we'd arranged an extended warranty when we bought the car there was no charge. I'm plodding on with my physio exercises and today I finally got my foot looked at.  As I suspected this has only led to a referral to the hospital orthopaedic team.  I wonder how long that will take to come through!

The floor tiles for the kitchen have arrived.  There are just a couple of bits we still need to get from IKEA which we'll do over the weekend.  Matthew has picked a good week to be away.  He is off to Switzerland tomorrow for a week for training.  Fortunately he is not one of the many people that have been laid off by UBS this week.

Well now I need to get on with packing up the kitchen - it's another good exercise in sorting out what we really need to keep and what needs to be recycled/rehomed.

Never a dull moment here!