phillsacre.me.uk

That was probably was one of the most cryptic titles I’ve come up with to date! It’s due to the fact that on Saturday, Phil and I went back to the house in Woodbridge where I spent most of my formative years. (Well, I wasn’t there the whole time, but that’s where we were living).

Anyway, after I went off to university – nine years ago – my parents moved to Ipswich. But they didn’t sell the house, the rented it out. Anyway, my Dad is retiring next year, and they want to sell the house. So, they gave the tenant notice, and she moved out last month. The past couple of weeks they’ve been spending a lot of time at the house trying to get it into a state where it can be sold.

You may have guessed that the tenant didn’t exactly leave things in a pristine state. If I’m honest, it was actually pretty awful what she did. She removed a lot of the work surfaces and units from the kitchen, she ‘painted’ – badly – various places, the whole place was filthy… I could go on. On Saturday Phil and I spent most of the day helping Mum and Dad to get the place cleaned up. Phil went into the garden to do some tidying, and I spent the afternoon ripping out a rather badly installed network.

I think she must have had someone come in to network the house (why she didn’t use wireless I don’t know – I think it was available in 2001, but I would guess these network points were installed well after that). Firstly, there were holes all over the house to allow the cables through the floor and up into the loft. Then the cables were basically run across the walls, i.e. there were a boatload of cable clips keeping the cables in place. Unfortunately in some places the cable clips had broken, letting the cable basically droop down! In other words, it was a mess.

So anyway, I basically ripped out the whole lot, leaving a large number of small cable clip holes – but at least it was better than leaving it there. I don’t think anyone else would have wanted it to be honest!

It was quite funny to see the old house to be honest – my room still had my old desk unit in it (which my Dad and I designed and built), but apart from that there was no furniture there. It’s been so long since we lived there that I do feel like it’s not really home any more, but it did bring back a few memories! Good times. Still, live moves on.

That took up most of our Saturday afternoon. Then, after that we went round to Anne-Marie and Sarah’s to watch Doctor Who. It wasn’t a bad episode this week although I don’t think it was exactly a classic. Then we watched the next couple of episodes of ‘Blackpool’ (really enjoying it, only one more episode to go now though!). Oh, and I should mention that ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was also good on Friday night – still so many questions, but I’m really looking forward to the next episode though! Phil says it’s kind of like old school Doctor Who, where they did six part stories and you were kept on tenterhooks until the next week!

On Sunday we weren’t at church in the morning (unusually), so we did a bit of gardening and the like. Then we went round to Jo and Evie’s and spent the day in the park with them, which was a really pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Then we went to Sunday@6, and afterwards watched ‘Young Victoria’. It was a fairly entertaining film but not one I’d really want to watch again to be honest – not my cup of tea!

Once you have a house, that is it: you’ll have a “To-Do” list as long as your arm for life! (Well, as long as you have a house, anyway).

We are currently in the process of having our bathroom fixed up (i.e. the dividing wall between the toilet and bathroom knocked through, new towel rail, a shaver point put in, new shower head rail, etc). It’s a job we’ve been wanting to do for ages, and now we’ve finally got round to it. You’d think that would decrease the list of things we have to do, wouldn’t you? Think again. The electrician (who came to wire up the shaver point and the lighting) said that our lighting circuit is 60s standards (which isn’t surprising given that the house was built in the 60s). Modern standards are different – in order for it to be different we’d need to have the whole lighting circuit rewired. This is actually a fairly big job, costing around £1000. Not only that, but we’d also need to have a new fuse box put in at the same time…

Of course, it’s not urgent that we have the house lighting re-wired. But if we want to have any electrical work done on the house in the future I think we’ll need to have the wiring brought up to modern standards, otherwise electricians will refuse to touch it.

So, I thought I’d give a brief list of things which we have already done on the house, and things which we still need to do. It will be interesting to come back to it in a year or two and see what’s changed!

TASKS COMPLETED

• Re-decorate main bedroom
• Re-decorate spare bedroom
• Re-decorate small bedroom (partially completed)
• Replace facia board
• Paint cupboard under stairs, fit shelves
• Create flower borders, plant up garden (partially completed)
• Paint shed

TASKS STILL TO DO

• Replace boiler (current boiler went out of production in 1983, it’s almost certainly older than I am)
• Re-decorate living room / dining room
• Replace cooker hood & install cupboards in kitchen
• Re-wire house
• Move front door to be flush with front of house (i.e. the porch area would be come part of the house)

And that’s just a sample really – once we’ve got through that lot there will be carpets to replace, rooms to re-decorate (again), and a myriad of small jobs. Ah well, keeps us busy I suppose, not that we really need any help on that front!

Well, I suppose it’s time to post up a quick review of what happened last week! Philippa’s parents came up to help us do some decorating – we wanted to do the whole of the spare room in one week. The spare room had previously been rather a bright shade of pink, so we wanted to change it to something a little bit more mellow – “warm apricot” was the colour we chose for the walls. Anyway, it’s fair to say that we had a very successful week: the room is now painted (including the ceiling, skirting boards and door – not all the same colour, I hasten to add…) and looks very nice.

We also managed to do various other little jobs around the house and garden, so all in all it was quite a productive week.

The weekend was pretty busy as well! Phil’s sister Roz came up on Thursday and stayed until Saturday. On Friday evening we all went out for a meal at the Yew Tree in Great Horkesley (which was very nice, by the way, thanks for the recommendation Simon!) Afterwards, Phil’s parents went home and Roz came back with us.

She stayed overnight, and on Saturday morning we went into town to do a bit of shopping. I bought a couple of new CDs (‘We Live and Die in These Towns’ by The Enemy, and ‘Stabat Mater’ by Karl Jenkins) as well as a couple of new clothes.

In the afternoon Roz went home, and I headed down to London for Phil P’s stag do. We all went out for a meal at “Planet Hollywood”, which was very nice – albeit a bit on the expensive side! Afterwards, I went for a drink with Alex (everyone else had gone home… bunch of lightweights).

On Sunday, we went to church in the morning as per usual, and then afterwards we were invited round to the Savilles for lunch which was rather nice. We didn’t get back home until late afternoon, and we spent most of the rest of the evening clearing up the spare room (i.e., putting back everything we’d had to take out with the decorating).

Also we watched “Doctor Who”. I was actually quite impressed by this week’s episode – it was well written, and explored some very interesting themes. Just how much can the Doctor change time? Will it be a running theme in this series? They could do a lot with it… good stuff.

As I may have already mentioned, this week we are off work to do some decorating. Phil’s parents are up and are helping us out. We’ve been quite productive so far! The main goal of this week is to repaint the violently pink room (otherwise known as the spare room).

We bought some paint at the weekend, and we’ve been busy preparing and painting the past couple of days. All the walls now have two coats of paint and look really good, all that’s left to do is paint the skirting boards and radiator. So we’re not doing badly!

There are a few other little jobs that we want to do but we’ll have to see how it goes.

I realise that was a pretty pointless post, but it does at least explain why I don’t have very much time to blog this week :-)

Well, this weekend was fun. On Friday evening, the A12 near Colchester was closed because a lorry with gas canisters in it caught fire. Unfortunately, it also meant that they closed the railway line… although the line wasn’t closed between Ipswich and Colchester, it still affected my journey home! Last week was pretty bad for trains generally, certainly in the evenings at least – more trains were late than ran on time! At least on Friday it wasn’t really ‘One’ railways’ fault.

On Saturday, we did some decorating. We painted another wall of the main bedroom, and also I started stripping wallpaper (fortunately only one of the walls has wallpaper on it… unfortunately it’s the longest in the room!). The wall we painted was originally a sort of mushroom / beige kind of colour… we wanted to cover it with a creamy white. Here’s a little tip: if you want to cover another colour with white, be prepared to do quite a few coats! We had to do three on the wall, it was ridiculous. We used up almost a whole tin of paint! Still, it’s done now.

In the evening we watched ‘Groundhog Day’, as I hadn’t seen it before. It was a very enjoyable film :-)

On Sunday we went to Fordham in the morning, and then stayed on for the harvest lunch. After that we came back home and I worked on the Fordham website for a bit. In the evening, Phil went round to Anne-Marie’s for a girly night there, so I invited Matthew and Dan to come round to watch Top Gear and have some pizza. That was a good evening, although I suspect we talked a lot less than the girls!

Anyway, that’s all for now…