English Rose Kitchen

Something like, but not actually my old accordion

OK an accordion isn’t traditionally considered a necessary item for the kitchen, but I just acquired one today and it most certainly is vintage.

I don’t really play accordion, but over the last few months I’ve taken to knocking out the chords to a couple of tunes that my current band (Rotten Hill Gang, since you ask) play live. One of them is a sort of dub/rap version of Pick a Pocket. But that needn’t concern us here.

The accordion I’ve been playing so far weighs a couple of pounds and stretches to about 1 1/2 octaves with only a few buttons for the left hand (I won’t bore you with the details). It’s been fine, but the bellows have perished and there are now so many layers of packing and gaffa tape over them that they barely move without unreasonable force and when they do, the wheezing sound (of the bellows, not me) overpowers the sound of the reeds. I also get a gust of musty air directly in my face.

Something like, but not actually my new accordion

I picked up this “new” one from a delightful chap in delightful Maldon, Essex (a 1 1/2 hour drive nearly to the coast). It was one of those wonderful 10 minute glimpses into someone else’s life you sometimes get during an eBay transaction. It’s a 120 bass behemoth with 41 treble keys (sorry, a bit techy) that weighs in at around 19 pounds and it requires the aid of two friends to climb into the straps. It needs a quick service, but there’s not much wrong with it except that it turns out that you need to be pretty in shape to fully extend the bellows on the beast. Now that puffing sound you hear really is me!

The unfortunately thing about it is that it’s VERY LOUD! There really is no way of playing it quietly and, frankly, while I’m learning the thing it’s not going to be pleasant for Ray or the neighbours.

Oh – and – er – I’m not quite sure yet how I’m going to explain to Ray how this newest piece of retro equipment complements our retro kitchen.

So we spent the day going round timber merchants and flooring places receiving more and more conflicting information. Most conflicting of all was whether it would be better to use solid or engineered flooring.

Even more confusing than that was the cost. Looking online we can see all sorts of flooring that seems to match our needs around the £30..£40 a square metre for solid oak, with engineered boards coming in at considerably less. Going round today the only flooring we saw that we liked was in the £110 range, with engineered flooring costing about the same.

Also we’d previously been advised that we’d be best off using solid wood, but today a very nice man in a very reputable shop told us that because we’e laying on top of a pine floor with a 15″ drop underneath it our best bet would be to put down a layer of marine ply to cut off the damp, and then use engineered planks, partly because the lower layers are better at absorbing damp and partly because engineered boards are stronger at the width we want them, around 180mm. That’s in sharp contrast to previous advice, which was that solid wood is stronger for wider boards.

Ho hum.

Interest rate update
Well ain’t that great? The letter from the Halifax just arrived this morning confirming that our interest rate is now 2.84%. That’s below the supposed 3% floor. Hmm – wonder if it really will go any lower.

  

The symbol that rules our lives

The nice thing about the Bank of England’s recent bout of generosity dose of realism regarding interest rates is that we’re now paying far less interest on our mortgage than we were before re-mortgaging.

In fact we already were because we moved the whole thing onto a tracker deal that’s slightly below the Bank of England base rate for 2 years. The catch being that we had to pay a bit for it (I’m sure they called it something like an “arrangement fee”). It’s worked out rather well and there’s talk of interest rates dropping even lower than their current 3%. In principle if they go low enough, the bank will be forced to pay us to buy our home!

Unfortunately and probably for precisely that sort of reason, according to the BBC our mortgage lender won’t allow tracker mortgage rates to go lower than 3%. It’s probably all there on the agreement if I could be bothered to dig it out, but in common with most of the rest of the world I can’t and in any case, nobody foresaw rates dropping this low a year ago so nobody paid any attention to such details.

Am I aggrieved about that? Probably not – my own fault for not caring paying more attention, but I’m pretty sure there was no upper limit either, which would only be fair!

Our contractor inspires confidence

… well of sorts.

Our contractor came round today to take another look and discuss the schedule. His biggest problem at the moment is that he still doesn’t have a clue as to what English Rose Kitchen units look like aside from the one small top unit I could show him (remember our entire collection is still in my parents’ garage).

The good news, especially if you happen to be my parents, is that we worked out when everything is going to happen. So, roughly:

1. Start of December – we get everything into storage (and I secretly hope that most of it stays there!).

2. At the same time we order the wood for the new flooring. 180mm solid oak since you ask, and if anyone knows where we can get a good deal we’d love to hear from you.

3. At the same time we get the roof fixed. It’s never been quite right whenever it rains and the wind blows in a certain direction since .. well someone fixed it with minimal lead and a lot of guesswork.

4. Mid December the wood arrives and sits around getting used to its new home. We’re timing it like this because realistically we’re not going to get anyone to do any work over Christmas so it might as well be used fruitfully allowing the wood to acclimatise itself.

5. Around the same time we take the kitchen units round to Farouk to strip and powder coat. Having seen the results of people’s attempts to paint them, it seems powder coating is the best option.

6. January 1st 2009 (or thereabouts), Mr Contractor comes in with the boys to lay the flooring, work out how to fit the units and … oh, we forgot to tell you about the steam room that we’re also renovating at the same time, but that’s a story for another blog.

Wish us luck!

Axx

 

So close and yet so far

Getting the home improvement loan
Stepping back a bit, I realise I’ve never told the sorry tale of how we’re managing to fund the project.

I bought the property 10 years ago during a slight dip in the market and just before the sustained house price boom of the late 90’s to the mid naughties, so we decided to re-mortgage to raise the money to renovate the flat.

Re-mortgaging
The was just before the credit crunch grew its head of steam so things were a little easier and as it turned out, by switching to a new mortgage company and to a lower interest rate, we effectively raised the entire home improvement loan while slightly reducing our repayments. It’s a tracker mortgage, just below the Bank of England base rate.

 

How I imagine the mortgage company’s lawyers to be

Bloody conveyancing lawyers!
The re-mortgage agreed, the fun began. You see lawyers for mortgage companies, estate agents, buyers and sellers of property have contrived to milk the arcane system of property ownership in this country for all it’s worth. To explain briefly, my property is a house comprising two apartments (OK, flats to us Brits). I live on the ground floor and, as is common in these situations, I share the freehold of the property with the owner of the upstairs flat, while each of us has a 99 year lease on our own floor.