General Easter Update

It's been a while and we're off on holiday tomorrow so here's a few thoughts to jot down before I go.

Easter and "The Passion"

It's Easter Sunday. Easter is obviously a hijacked pagan festival - witness the eggs and bunnies that symbolise new life as spring approaches - heck the date of easter even changes with the lunar cycle! But, regardless of that, this is the time when Christians celebrate that Jesus rose from the dead and brought us a new and different sort of life. God has forgiven us of the wrong we've done and we can follow Jesus in faith knowing that he died and was brought back from the dead to live forever. I join with the many today who shout "Hallelujah" - Praise the Lord!

It's been a good time of reflecting on what Jesus did and why it means so much to us. It
saddens me that people have so little understanding of the man at the centre of the Christian faith. I'm not the sort to ram it down people throats, but if they ask I'll happily explain, and highly recommend, my faith, that I have come to see as the truth. But the
occasions to explain to people are sadly limited, even at this time of the year.

Encouragingly, this year, the BBC has done a screening of a 4-part film of "The Passion" - the events of the last few days of Jesus' life. This has been very interesting to watch. Many have tried to interpret the events in their own ways down the years. I like the BBC's attempt. It feels quite real and give you a good sense of what Jerusalem was like at the time, and some insight into why certain people may have done what they did on that first Easter. What it lacked for me was a spiritual element - little prayer, no angels, no miracles, no fear of God. I thought the pharisees more interested in what was going on that then disciples. It felt earthly, lacking a heavenly God. A tale told, but somehow lacking the essence of what was really going on. A political revolution was definitely going on, but the "kingdom of God" seemed relegated to little more than a nice-to-have desire of the heart. I think it lacked...well...passion!

But good on the Beeb for showing such a thing. And don't get me wrong - it was a REALLY good re-enactment of what happened - captivating and compelling. It was just very non-committal too.

Oh, and there seems to have been a lot of chocolate around. Not sure what that's about.

Small Group Leading

I attend a thing called a "Small Group". This is a group of about 10 people from church who meet during the week to chat, pray, study the bible and share news together. Small groups are an important part of church life as they enable people to connect and meet in God's presence in a deeper way than you can in a larger group on the Sunday.

This week I led the group in a study. It was the first time I'd done this for a long time and it seemed to go down well, but I'm not entirely sure. It's always hard to judge how these things look from the other side. I really enjoy preparing and leading groups like this and I hope I'll get to do it again.

Garden

With 3 days off before our trip away, we were meant to be gardening. Both digging and planting. But the weather's been AWFUL. Snow, sleet, hail, rain, gales, freezing temperatures. So that'll have to wait. Longer days are coming so I suspect some evening digging may be required. We've not planted a thing yet and only have a small patch of weedless garden.

House

So instead we've been concentrating on the house. Sally's a star with painting and has made great progress on the dining room. We've committed quite a lot of the last couple of days to tidying up the edges and we're VERY nearly done. Here's the before and after:

As well as painting we've also put up another nice light. I confess, I thought this was a bit over the top for the small room, but Sally loves it and it is a beautiful thing and we got it for half price.

Wiring the new light in was interesting (as are most thing involving the electrics in our house). We have "loop in" wiring, so three cables come in from the ceiling; power in, power out, and the loop to the switch. This makes for a complicated bit of wiring to get the light connected up. However, in this fitting, the live and neutrals seemed to be wired backwards. All the black cables were where the reds should be, and vice versa. A quick chat with my dad and a few diagrams later and it appeared to be safe. After all, the previous fitting worked!

It seems that normally you have the three live wires tied together with power coming back from the switch to the light on the "spare" neutral cable. In our case, we had the three neutrals tied together with the spare live coming back from the switch. From a "logical" circuit point of view this means that the switch is on the neutral side of the light, rather than the live. There was no reason why it shouldn't work. And, indeed, it does!

I'm sure I should be more scared of electricals than I am. I'll get a nasty shock one day.

Rats!

Darn it. The rats are back. We've heard vague scratchings recently and dismissed it, but they were definitely up there last night. I can only see one little hole outside that they might be getting in. We've put fresh poison down and some proper rat traps in the loft. Grrr....

Cycling

Not much going on on the cycling front. I've been doing longer trips into work and back and generally enjoying being out on the Felt. Both bikes need a good clean which I was hoping to do this weekend and haven't got around too. Oh, and I had to replace another spoke on the Raleigh. Not sure how this one broke but fixing it was easy having done it before.

Had other transport problems too when the car started spluttering a bit on the way back from the outdoors show. Kwik Fit fixed it with a new clamp on the exhaust - the existing one had come loose. They charged me £2. Bargain!

Other Developments

There are some other interesting developments going on that I can't really talk about too. These are very much connected to our spiritual and church life and involve some interesting changes that are going on around us. Some of this is stuff that we thing God has been telling us might happen in some way over the last year so it's very exciting seeing how that might come to fruition. Please, if anyone's reading, don't ask us any questions because we can't answer them. I probably shouldn't even be putting the teaser out.

More will be apparent in the coming months, I hope!

Holiday

And so to probably our most anticipated holiday so far. We're only going to York and the Lake District, but we've both had such a hard few weeks at work that we REALLY need it. We're looking forward to our first bit of fell walking on our own (how will we get on without a more experienced guide?), and we'll hopefully have a rest in there too.

I will probably be quiet for a few days, both Blog and Twitter-wise. Back with some photos on Saturday!

Simple things

Some of this DIY stuff is so much more complicated than it looks.

After a hint from a friend of ours who came for dinner a while back, we decided to finally put proper locks on our bathroom doors. Well, not locks, but little sliding latches.

"Easy", I thought. Jusy buy 'em, from B&Q, fix one bit to the door and another bit to the frame and Bob's your uncle!

Not so! Did you know that there are two types of simple sliding latch? I didn't!

The first one went on fine. More fluke than anything.

I got the first bit of the second one on and then suddenly realised that it was not going to work. I had to go and buy another latch of a slightly different type!

A quick explanation. It all depends on which side of the door you're on. From one side a door closes agains the frame. I'll call this the "outside" of the door. When the door is closed it sits behind a chunk of wood. In this case you can use a latch which slides into a hole in the frame. Like this...



If you're on the "inside" of the door, the door is flush with the frame - so you don't have the chunk of wood to drill a big hole into. So you have to have a raised "hole" for the latch to fit into. Like this...


It WELL confused me for a while. It all makes perfect sense now but why didn't we think of it before? How am I supposed to know that there's two different sorts of latch.

I believe this is what people call "trial and error". I sense there may be more of this ahead!

Digging it.

Mud

Glorious mud.

That's what's at the end of our fairly large garden!

Oh, and weeds. Creeping buttercup apparently. The queen of weeds in the Wintle garden.

Our Garden

One big reason for buying the house that we bought was the c. 100ft garden. For a nearly-town house this is HUGE! And it's nicely split with some lawn, some patio and a vegetable patch.

There are numerous reasons why we think a veg patch is great:

1. It's OH SO ENGLISH!
2. We believe in buying locally
3. We're trying to be sustainable (might not achieve that this year but hope to in future years!)
4. We hate supermarket food packaging
   
5. Gardening is fun, and a good team-building opportunity
6. It will help us keep fit
7. Food will taste better
8. Eating vegetables will be SO much more satisfying knowing that we've grown them ourselves.
   

Oh and we've already decided that there's no point resisting the fact that we're turning into our parents so there's not real excuse NOT to get into gardening.

Preparing the Soil

Now, we bought the house in October and it took us a while to move and unpack and settle, so we've only really just seriously started thinking about the garden and from what we gather, all the weed killing processes (mulching, rotavating, poisoning and so on) start in the autumn and progress over the winter.

Failed Cardboard Mulching and so on...

We DID originally try laying lots of cardboard over the patch. This would remove the light and air and kill the plants and they would then rot into the ground! But this has only been a little bit successful. We didn't really have enough cardboard and it kept blowing away - you need LOTS of BIG boxes and heavy things to hold them down - fabric pegs are not strong enough. This probably works if you have lots of old carpet or something but just cardboard boxes really didn't do it.

The idea with rotavating is very similar - you chop everything up and over the winter it rots into the ground. We didn't do this. It would probably have worked better.

We didn't try herbicides as we're TRYING to be organic and not cover our nice veggies with nasty chemicals.

Digging

And so we find ourselves in the spring with a garden full of weeds. The only route...manual eradication! Yes, down on our hands and knees pulling up us much as we can, roots and all.

It's slow, back breaking work. But it's working. We're adding in some compost to our very-clay'y (?) soil and it's actually looking like something might grow in it! In fact, I'm quite encouraged by how much the weeds like the soil!

And our veggies will taste all the better for it!

Transformations!

So, when we moved into our house the front room looked kinda like this:

It should be pointed out that the red stripe was NOT our idea. The general mess and clutter was.

Now, Sally has put a LOT of work into the painting. Her approach is very much little bits here and there whenever time permits. Whereas mine is to book some serious time out and do a load in one big go. And so, with great glee, we have taken a weekend off and finished off (mostly) the front room's facelift:

I think you'll agree is looks substantially more charming, sophisticated, pretty, homely, warm, open and a whole load of other things. We appreciate that it won't be to everyone's taste, but we like it a LOT!


In fact, I'm VERY surprised at how different it looks and I feel quite inspired to get on and make the rest of our house "ours".

The Miracle of Plumbing that is PTFE Tape

We recently discovered (amongst lots of other things going wrong all around us) a small leak a the point that our washing maching inlet hose connects to the water pipe.

This was a problem when we first moved in and we initially fixed it by buying a new hose and doing it up really tight. So I was a little disappointed to find it leaking again.

I mentioned this on the phone to my dad who said, quite cryptically, "wrap some PTFE tape around the thread".

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's poly-terta-flouro-ethalene" (or something).

Oh well, I'll look it up I thought.

Turns out it's a minor miracle. Why don't people tell you things like this at school? How are you supposed to find out?

Just wrap it (CLOCKWISE...to go with the thread) round the thread a few times, and screw the connector back on. Drips gone!

Shelf hanging - a lesson in trust!

Now here's a thing that's quite contrary. I'm not a very trusting person, while at the same time, I tend to believe what people tell me.

I think it's all down to experience.

If someone says, for example, that they've got tickets to go see the Spice Girls at Wembley stadium. As long as it's not said with a fairly strong tone of irony or sarcasm, I'll believe that!It's pretty believable.

If, however, my wife told me that she'd had a piece of toast with peanut butter and really enjoyed it, I probably wouldn't take her word for it, and would insist on checking the jar. If something seems unlikely to me, I will check it out. This sounds reasonable, but I often feel like I'm unnecessarily doubting people when such things happen.

And so, with my sense of mistrust on red-alert, I was confronted with shelf hanging. Our house has lots of bare walls, which with a few planks of wood, can easily be utilised as storage space.

A quick trip to B&Q to buy the aforementioned wall furniture, and a drill, and we were off! Sally claimed I went a bit "drill crazy" at first - she probably had a point. We have a lot of holes to make!

But, while confident with making holes, I had doubts about the fittings. Most of the shelves we hung were held up by little "keyhole" fixings. A small, thin plate of metal, with a keyhole-shaped hole in it, that hung over a single wall screw.

And the instructions tell me that two of these little things will hold 25 kilograms?! That's 25 litres of water? It's more than a third of my body weight? Over 3 times the weight of an official men's shotput shot? And the average weight of an antarctic cod? (I'm open to other suggestions as to what this is the equivalent of)

Yeah, right!

And so, with the shelves up, I nervously started loading them up. I have no experience of this kind of thing, but I know that recipe books are heavy. I was very tentative. I told Sally to keep the heavy ones on the worktop - no Nigel Slater or Nigella up there!! I tried to carefully distribute the load between the two supports. I went round inspecting them every day for about a week. I cautiously pulled them occasionally to check that they'd take a little more weight.

It was very much a test of faith!

Lots of DIY seems to be like this. Trying it out, sometimes failing, learning as you go, but having the confidence to have a go in the first place, and to try again if you fail. I'm very much having to overcome some of my doubts and trust what people tell me in order to get things done.

It turns out that shelves are pretty sturdy, and two little metal plates can take a fair bit of weight - I don't know that I've risked 25kg yet and I don't have any shot or antarctic cod to test it with, but we've got some heavy - and fragile - stuff, hanging on the walls of our kitchen now.

Not only that, but I'm now a fully competent, drill-crazy, shelf hanger!

A few USEFUL things that I learned along the way:

1. Those keyhole fittings should definitely be flush with the bracket - if you buy cheap shelves with badly pre-cut holes, make sure that you enlarge the holes rather than forcing the bracket in.
   
2. If you have a large wall space that you want to put a LONG shelf in (we've done this in our utility room), don't try to hang one super-long shelf with more than two supports. Correctly aligning more than two supports such that a shelf rests flush on top of them is very hard. Use two shorter shelves instead!
3. Screwing the shelf to the supports is easiest done if you pre-drill the holes. Put the shelf in place, mark up where the holes should be, hold it all still, drill the holes (with light pressure - shouldn't have to push hard to get through the wood), and then take it off the wall to screw together. (There's probably a "proper" way to do this, but I found this method much easier than screwing it together while the shelf was on the wall. In fact, the pressure required to screw the shelf to the support whilst on the wall seemed to exceed the 25kg and bend the keyhole bracket!!)

I can do it!

A new thread starts. Having bought a house I'm learning something else new - DIY! Sally bought me a book as a gift called "You Can Do It!" (It's a B&Q book and B&Q's advertising slogan used to be "You can do it when you B&Q it!"). This thread will be the ups and down, ins and outs, successes, failures, and lessons learned, of learning to do DIY.

Which starts here with the question "Why does no one teach us this stuff?". I remember painting and stuff as a kid but DIY should be handed down to us somehow. I've lived in rented houses since I was 18 and so all my DIY and decorating has been done for me. I haven't got a clue about filling, sanding, wallpapering, plumbing, electrics, lighting, interior design, building, plastering etc. There's so much to know! And so much can go wrong.

I hope my readers can learn something from my mistakes.

And, for those of you who know, I've already learned my u-bend lesson!!! Won't be doing that again.