Tag Archives: baking

A better view

February 27, 2017 by Caroline In Ethel's House Tagged baking, fencing, gates 2 Comments

The new fence is in and as we’d hoped, it’s really opened up the view at the front of the house now those wooden bars have gone.

The guys have also hung the gates for us. I just need to get some bolts so they can be locked into the ground, meaning you can open one and leave the other shut, and a loop catch (I’m sure there’s a proper name for it!) to go over the top. Oh, and to paint them green, of course!

Since the fencing crew has been working in some vile weather, I’ve kept them well-fuelled. The favourite has been these homemade hobnobs!

More clearing out

July 27, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House Tagged baking, byres, electrician, house history, power Leave a comment

As I need somewhere to store the hay I’m hopefully going to be baling on Thursday or Friday, this week I’m concentrating my efforts on clearing out the biggest of the byres, which will apparently hold 250 square bales when it’s empty. It’s the one we’ve been storing all the wood we stripped out in:

Behind that piece of framework is an old electric cooker, which I found a load of nearly-new muffin trays and casserole dishes inside, and behind the hot water cylinder was the carcass of chest of drawers – in the one remaining drawer, I found these:

I’m asking around to find out who they were. It’s looking like the man is Hugh MacDonald (who I think was Ethel’s father-in-law and my neighbour Christopher’s uncle), but no-one has yet identified the lady.

Whilst shifting some of the wood pile, I found another dated board. This was on the underside of one of the shelves we took out of the kitchen pantry:

And this week’s cake? Well, on Monday night Pete announced that since a packet of Silk Cut had reached £10 in the village shop, he was giving up smoking, so I thought I’d better come up with something a bit spectacular!

I’ve had the quote through from SSE Power Distribution for moving the overhead line and it’s come back at a very reasonable £194.28. I forwarded it to Dougie for him to check that they’d included everything he needed, and he rang back this evening to say (a) it was fine, go ahead and (b) he was nearly non-contagious again and hoping to get up to us for a day this week.

Let there be light!

June 26, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Projects, Renovations Tagged baking, electrician, Ethel's House, insulation, oak flooring, renovation, roof, rooflight, velux Leave a comment

David arrived on Thursday and had a quick site meeting with Pete and Dougie, the upshot of which is that he put the Velux windows in on the side of the house Pete is currently working on and will be back again at some point this week to put the studwork in for Dougie. I went down on Thursday evening to have a look at the windows and was so pleased that I almost cried! The amount of light coming into the top floor now is amazing.

Dougie is still tunnelling, very neatly.

And having had a look at our kitchen layout, he’s now more convinced than ever that venting the extractor fans from there and the bathroom through the roof is going to be too much distance for them to work effectively, so he’s having an exploratory dig through the wall to put them out of the back instead.

I went to Rembrand at the weekend and ordered up the insulation, which came to an eye-watering £1,778. I keep telling myself that it’s paid for itself once I’ve saved about 4,200 litres of heating oil… Seriously, as I intend to own this house for a very long time, it’s a good investment. While we were in there we saw they had an end of line special offer on 18mm engineered oak flooring, so today I’ve been measuring up the ground floor as it looked really nice and at £21.99 a square metre, worth grabbing if they have enough. (A similar thickness bought online is around £29.99 a square metre.) Measurements are as follows:

Kitchen – 3.36 x 4.00 into bay window = 13.44sqm
Living room – 3.90 x 4.00 into bay window = 15.6sqm
Hall – 3.20 x 1 plus 1 x 0.52 plus 1.09 x 0.9 = 4.7sqm
Total = 33.74sqm – so I’ll order 35sqm, which will be £769.65 (assuming the price they were showing included VAT…) and if I go and see them tomorrow, it can be delivered with all the insulation on Thursday.
The bathroom will need something different, as engineered wood usually isn’t suitable for use in it, but I measured it anyway – 1.7 x 2.15 to the shower tray = 3.655sqm.

Today we’ve been baking to feed the team next week. I’ve made a lemon drizzle cake and Mick has gone all in on the sausage rolls after they got rave reviews last week – he’s done sausage, pate, cheese and onion, Mexican-spiced sausage, and wild boar and mushroom! Also pictured are the custard biscuits I made last week, after I raided Mum’s recipe book while I was away.

Starting to feel like we’re getting somewhere

June 9, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged baking, concrete, fireplace, floor, kitchen, liner, pointing, renovation, roof, slates, stone, tanking Leave a comment

I’m not quite sure how it’s got to be Thursday already, but this week has passed in a blur and Pete, James and Connor have got an awful lot done.

The kitchen has been plastered:

coated with bitumen:

and then the liner was put down and the concrete floor re-poured. Try getting through THAT, damp!!

The same’s happened upstairs in bedroom one (minus the floor liner), as that gable end faces the sea and takes a battering:

And they’ve also sorted out that wobbly stone under the window:

and picked and pointed the gable end in bedroom two (I’ve decided to keep that fireplace as bare stone and not put the little surround back in, by the way):

So the inside is more or less ready to hand over to Dougie and David, once the floor’s set in the kitchen – only we’re having trouble tracking down David! The problem with using someone widely acknowledged to be one of the best joiners in the area is that he’s very in demand. Pete could really have done with him here this week, but we think he’s been working down at Forsinard where there’s no mobile signal, as no-one’s been able to speak to him. By ringing his home number at 9pm last night, Pete finally managed to speak to his other half, so fingers crossed he might be able to start with us next week, as Dougie will be back and ideally we want the studwork to go up for the wiring to be run down (and I need to know whether he’s using 3×2 or 2×2 so I know what thickness of insulation to order!)

Outside there’s progress as well. The scaffolding is up on the back and the roof tiles are off:

That membrane does make it rather blue inside!

And after a long weekend down the road at our neighbour’s house after they were delivered to the wrong address on Friday, Travis Perkins came back on Wednesday and brought the roof slates up:

And, of course, one of the most important bits – care and feeding of your roofing team! It was cheese and chive flapjacks today:

I also had a visit from ERG today to quote me for the windows and door. Before they arrived, I looked out the paperwork from when ours were done three years ago and noted that 2 doors and 10 windows came to £8,800 – so considering that I was wanting 1 door and 5 windows, my estimate in the budget of £5,000 seemed about right. Er, no, their prices have gone up a bit. List price £8,300, 20% returning customer discount brought it down to £6,640. I made the time-honoured tradesman ‘suck-through-your-teeth’ noise, he asked how much I was hoping to do it for and we ended up shaking hands at £5,812. The surveyor should be coming round in the next two weeks to measure up more accurately and then it’s 6-8 weeks for manufacture and delivery, which will be about right for my schedule. The front door will be dark green outside, white inside and part-glazed. The windows will be white inside and out, with oak window sills and door and window furniture will be silver. Once the exterior is painted just off-white, it should look pretty smart!

Tomorrow Callum is coming to sweep the three chimneys. I’m not sure how many years it is since they were last done, but Derek the heating engineer made the same suck-through-your-teeth noise when he looked up the living room one as we were discussing the woodburner, so I think it’s going to get messy….

Lift off!

June 2, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged baking, cabling, electrician, electrics, layout, renovation, satellite dish, sockets, switches, walls Leave a comment

I have actual people working on site 😀 It’s no longer just me, Mick and the dog, proper professionals are now getting to grips with my house (and one of them has told us we’ve saved a considerable sum of money by doing everything we’ve done so far by ourselves, which is good).

Dougie the electrician has been here two days this week and has removed all the old cabling, sockets, switches and the fuse box:

He’s taken up the floorboards upstairs to run the new cabling underneath:

And he casually mentioned that he’d need a plan of where I wanted all my light switches and sockets to go. Not something I’d actually got round to thinking about, so last night I scribbled it all out on some rough paper, showed it to Mick who made a couple of suggestions, and then this morning made a clean copy, photocopied it and went up to the house to present it to Dougie with the comment of, ‘Please tell me where I’ve been an idiot.’

Fortunately he thought it all looked sensible and made some suggestions of his own, namely an optical smoke alarm for the living room (where the burner will be), a heat alarm for the kitchen, and he’ll run two shotgun cables from where the satellite dish will come into the house up to a splitter in the attic, so two screens in the house can watch two different things if required (there’s no reception for a standard TV aerial here, the only way to get any television is satellite). The new fuse box and meter is going on the landing in the corner and we’ll probably put a slim run of cupboards along there to hide it, as the roof is too low for that space to be walked in anyway.

We are currently down a roofer, poor James has succumbed to the lurgy going round locally, but Pete and Connor have been here putting up scaffolding and today, since it was wet and windy, picking out the north gable end wall inside. It is now looking almost certain that we won’t be able to open up that big kitchen fireplace 🙁 Pete’s insurance company will give him an extension on his policy to cover it, but they want £2,000 (yes, that’s right TWO THOUSAND POUNDS!!) to insure against it collapsing and that’s before we take into consideration what Pete’s annual premium would go up by if it did actually all fall down. He’s asked them to review their figures and should get a reply from them tomorrow, but sadly it does look like it’s game over for the fireplace. Never mind, the smaller one in the living room is still lovely, just not quite as dramatic!

One thing I believe very strongly is that anyone kind enough to come all the way out here and do a job for me deserves looking after while they’re here, so there’s now a box down the road with a kettle, mugs, spoons, tea, coffee, sugar, a Thermos with milk in, squash and some home baking. This week it’s been my chocolate brownies, which Pete has had before and likes:

(Each of those little squares – and they’re about two bites – is around 250 calories, they’re totally sinful and completely worth it!). I asked what they’d like next week and Pete, who’s from the south east, was reminiscing about Kentish Apple Cake. Now, I’ve only found two recipes for it on the internet and neither of them sounds like his version, because they have chunks of apple stirred throughout the cake and Pete’s one has all the apple in a layer in the middle, so it’s going to be a bit experimental. I may have to put bowls and spoons in the box on Monday!