Monday, August 25, 2008

New floor

Today we fitted the new floor.

First we had to take the old washing machine to the tip and stop off at Helen's to pick up the laminate fitting kit that Alan was lending us.


Whoever said laying laminate is easy obviously has never tried to do our kitchen! Nothing is straight, EVERY single piece had to be cut to size and we had a pattern that had to be lined up! Still including underlay we had it done in 5 hours.

We also put up smart hangers for our tea towels, but I had to sew the ribbon on them to make them easier to hang.


In answer to mum's question, we have finished the painting and the tiles aren't going up that high. The rails were put up for the extra storage so we can put stuff away and have more room!

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Some Scrapping

I did some scrapping today!

I had to do it in the lounge as I can hardly get into the spare room for all the DIY stuff! It's probably the last chance I'll get in a while what with the kitchen and the fact that I start my college course next Saturday for my next lot of ACCA exams.

It's a scraplift from a sketch I made from Anso's blog.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

More work in the kitchen

This afternoon we put my hanging racks up in the kitchen.


We are hoping to get some clear jars from Ikea that match to put the spices in so they look a bit smarter.
I love having the knives so accessible.

We also got these smart dispensers for the washing up liquid and hand wash from Homebase.


Ps - family - we washed up!

Oh no broken!

Last week we got a free Playstation 3 with Ollie's phone contract. The idea was that it will replace our DVD player as we have the X-Box for gaming. "Fantastic we will be able to watch Blu Rays in HD", I thought. Turns out it's not so simple. Firstly the HDMI socket in the TV is directly underneath the bracket holding it to the wall. So we will have to hack the bracket to plug it in.

We had also thought that if we were faffing with electrics we may as well take the plunge and get Sky HD as they have a half price offer on. However, our TV only has 1 HDMI port. So Ollie sent me off to Richer Sounds to see what cables they recommend and also what boxes that allow you to plug 2 things into 1 box.

The man in Richer was quite blunt - for the money we would spend on all this, we would be better off buying a new TV with 2 HDMI ports.

Well, we thought, if we are buying a new TV we might as well upgrade to Full HD. This was starting to sound expensive! We have some stuff we were going to put on Ebay and were going to have it as a very Christmas present to each other.

Then Ollie uttered the immortal words "Let's wait to buy the TV and stuff until we've raised all the money because if we don't and we buy a TV this week, the washing machine will break next week"

Low and behold, this morning the washing machine broke!!!! So we had to buy a new one today from Sainsbury's electricals. The good news is that it's smaller than the old one so it won't stick out into the kitchen as much and it's silver and the same make as the oven so it will match a lot better.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Our kitchen



This is what the kitchen looked like at the beginning of the weekend. As you can see I have painted the walls so they are the same colour as the dining room.


We moved the fridge along and built another unit so that we could extend the work top. It took some sawing and screwing screws is quite difficult when both the electric screwdriver and the drill needed charging and the hammer drill was far too powerful.


We then had to cut the worktop to size both longways and widthways. That's a lot of cutting! Plus an unbelieveable amount of sawdust. There were more screws to hold it to the units and then I had to glue the end to the bit by the fridge.


Ta da! I now have an extra 66cm of worktop which makes a huge amount of difference. We are having Helen and Alan over for dinner on Friday to test it out!

Ikea do wicker baskets that will fit perfectly (we know - we got some for Gemma last time we went and she didn't collect them until after we had tested them out in our kitchen!)

A big HELLO to my grandad

I've had a request to say a big hello to my grandad who reads my blog so he knows what I'm up to as I don't visit him often enough.

I just wanted to say that I love him very much, and he's welcome to pop in for a cup of tea whenever he likes. Ollie was expecting him last weekend and he never came because he thought we were busy. I am never too busy for my grandad!

Monday, August 18, 2008

Exam passes!

I was up super early this morning as my exam results were released today. Modern technology is brilliant, there was no waiting for the postman, just log into the website and it's there in front of you. I also signed up for the email results service just in case the website crashed but I've not got that yet!

Anyway, I passed both exams. The pass mark is 50% and I got 64% in law and 74% in Performance management. I'm really pleased with this as the performance management exam had the lowest pass rate in the history of the ACCA in the December exam sitting and they had pledged that they were not going to make the exam easier.

We've been super busy in the kitchen this weekend, so I will give a full update with pictures later.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

What a storm!

What a storm we had last night. Ollie slept right through it of course! But it kept me awake for ages. I have never heard thunder so loud. It sounded like the house was falling down around my ears.

I did get up to see if our silly cats were ok and if they were inside safe and not scared of the storm. Brian was asleep in his new spot on top of the underlay for the laminate for the kitchen and Abby was on the poof. Both sound asleep and were more bothered by me turning the light on than the storm!

When the thunder and lightning eventually started to move away and I thought I may go back to sleep, it obviously moved into the estuary as we were then invaded by a flock of very noisy seagulls who obviously felt dry land was a better place to be!

So I'm a bit sleepy today!

Other news is that I have a new shiny mobile! And that we had our shopping delivered by Sainsbury's To You last night as our car is poorly in the garage. The car just had an engine coil go which sent the engine management system up the wall and put it in limp home at 1 mile an hour mode! It's all fixed now and Ollie's picking it up tonight.

I am very impressed by Sainsbury's and I think we will be repeating the exercise. All the veg were of a good quality and the dates on the meat were long enough that it won't go out of date before we can eat it.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Happy Birthday Ethan, Brian and Abby

Ethan, Brian and Abby were all 2 today!

Ethan had a party for his grown up friends tonight and one for his little friends tomorrow. In the rush to get home from work get changed and round to Helen and Alan's I forgot the camera! Still we have arranged a swap with Helen and Pip as Helen doesn't have any photos of his first birthday so watch this space!

We had a great time playing in the garden, although at one point I wasn't allowed to get up off the floor! And I did end up with several bruises!

After the little man had gone to bed we played Empire, where you all have to think of a person/cartoon character/etc etc and then the referee reads them all out and you have to guess which person playing was which name. I wasn't too bad at that, although I did have trouble remembering all of the names!!!