English Rose Kitchen

The answer to my prayers

Quite what it was that I was doing on December 11 that prevented me from writing the final installment of “All our worldly goods” I don’t recall, but I was prompted to revisit it today by a dream I had last night; a beautiful, glorious dream that we’d finished moving all our stuff into storage ready for the renovation to commence in earnest.

You see, during the five years since that first night spent in a sleeping bag on the kitchen floor I brought in items of furniture and decoration slowly and tastefully, in keeping with the style of the house. At all times I was in control and could make sure it never became too cluttered.

Then I got married.

Now I love Wifey more than anyone or anything, but nothing could prepare me for the astonishing onslaught of STUFF. Each time she went to visit her mother in Maryland she’d bring back huge crates of STUFF and as if that wasn’t enough, frequent visits to Argos ensured that more STUFF conspired to fill any remaining corners. International tat bazar eBay too, has been a prime provider of STUFF.

The last straw was that during 2008 branches of Primark and TK Max (purveyers of VERY CHEAP STUFF) opened in London, ensuring that the final pathways to storage areas are now completely blocked with YET MORE STUFF. Since we can now no longer reach the limited storage space we do have we can’t even use that to store the STUFF that’s blocking it and walking from one end of any given room to the other involves placing ones feet in very precise positions. In fact some cross-room paths can no longer be negitiated without arial movement.

I’ve previously mentioned that a considerable amount of the STUFF comprises shoes and suggested several ways in which their storage problem could be resolved. More practically though (at least in Wifey’s eyes) is the fact that we put down a deposit on some storage space some three weeks ago and, following the wonderful, heavenly dream that I had last night that the flat was as empty as the day I moved in (or rather, the day before Wifey arrived), tomorrow I’m going to start taking some of the accumulated STUFF up there.

Following my musings as to whether Halifax would let their tracker rates go any lower I can now answer “yes”. Pegged as we are at 1.6% below the Band of England rate, we’ve paying 1.84%.

How I still imagine the mortgage company’s lawyers to be

Solicitors are doin’ it for themselves
I walked to the next (correct) corner and located my actual front door, the door that my lawyer had mysteriously informed me that had been stolen from me since I first viewed the flat only weeks before. If anyone wonders why it takes so long to buy your home in England or Wales (the Scots wisely have their own laws on the subject) they need look no further than at the self serving obstacles that lawyers put in your way.

One of the last phone conversations in which my lawyer engaged me - with the clock ticking, naturally - was to ask whether I knew there was a railway line running some 300 yards from my house. I responded by informing him that there was a dotted white line down the middle of the road, and that I was charging him £80 an hour to research the fact. Oddly he didn’t get my point and further padded my bill by exchanging a series of letters (price £50 each) with the vendor’s solicitor regarding the positioning and usage of our rubbish bins (that’ll be garbage cans on t’ other side ot’ pond). You can read more solicitorial lunacy here.

Since I had no landline I took out my mobile and rang the first person I could think of to tell them the news, who happened to be in Sweden where I’d spent the previous week. “It sounds like you’re in a large, empty room”, he said. I put the phone down and looked around. He was right. In all my excitement to move in I’d forgotten that aside from the flat itself I had almost no posessions whatsoever, not even anything to sleep in.

After a call to a dear friend on Portobello Road I acquired a sleeping bag, two mismatched dinner plates and a fork (I still have all of them) which, during a trip to Sainsburys I augmented with a frying pan, two toilet brushes (”TWO toilet brushes?!”, my friend admonished me for my extravagance), a packet of spaghetti, some olive oil and some vegetables. I still have all but the food.

That night I slept on what is now our kitchen floor. One empty room was pretty like much the next and since the vendor had removed all the curtains I had to choose the one with the least direct street lighting.

The final instalment is tomorrow, the 10th anniversary of my moving in.

Some stuff similar to he sort of stuff we might be moving into storage

We put down a deposit on some storage space this week and are now setting about the task of doing an inventory of everything to move into it. It’s illuminating an horrifying in equal parts. I’ll get onto that shortly, but in the meantime it brought to mind the following, which I shall reveal in chapters as I get time to type …

Chapter 1
I moved in 10 years ago this Thursday (December 11 1998). T’was a Friday as I recall and it was the first place I’d ever bought, so you can imagine my excitement as I arrived at Foxtons (my estate agents or something called “realtors” according to my American wife) to pick up the keys and you can also imagine my dismay as they told me that “the person with the keys won’t be back for two hours”.

This was a real problem because I’d booked visits from the electricity board and phone company to come and change the pre-pay key meter into a proper one (this was previously a rental property) and to install a phone line, respectively.

I missed them of course, but finally got to the house at about 5pm. Actually to be honest I got to the wrong house at about 5pm because in my excitement I’d forgotten where I now lived and turned right one road too early.

The house whose front door I attempted to unlock was similar to my own in that it was a corner house and had a driveway, but was disappointingly run down, was missing an extension I was sure I’d bought and had a car I knew I didn’t own in the driveway. None of that stopped me from jiggling the key in the lock for 5 minutes and reaching for my phone to curse the Foxtons before it dawned on me that I didn’t live there.

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.

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.

We’re just about ready to rock with the kitchen renovation, so, partly in light of the credit crunch, we decided to review where we are financially.

We started by taking a good, long look at what was being taken out of our bank account every month by direct debits to see if we could make any savings there and the results were astounding! To save repeating myself, you can click on how to survive the credit crunch to read about it.

It’s either a story of future hope, or a sad tale of past folly. Suffice to say that the saving every year is enough for a good holiday, or at least to keep us out of the red.