Would I whinge about prices?

Friday 26th November 2010
First things first. Pam has complained that I did not put up a photo of the back of the house without the scaffolding, so here it is.

Note the green and environmental brownie point earning air source heat pump on the back wall. I should now have a guaranteed ticket to Greenpeace heaven (If they forget about working on nuclear bombers in my sinful past).

We ordered the flue pipes for the stove that is going in the new living room today. Now you may think that 5 metres of flxible pipe and a few other bits should not be to much of a drain on the poor old bank balance. Oh how wrong you would be.
£361, I repeat £361. The £61 I can understand but where they get the other £300 from is another of life's unfathomable mysteries. One bit of flexi pipe, a bit of tube, a couple of clamps some cement and glue. The first house that we lived in was originally built for less than that. I wouldn't mind but we allready had the bloody chimney, all we needed was something to stick up it. I think that we ended up being the ones who had something stuck up them.

It's a good job that at least we got the stove cheap. When I say cheap, it was not really cheap, it was just cheaper than the extortionate price that they were originally going to charge for it. The reduction in the price of the stove was supposedly because it was an ex-display model. I have yet to understand why they knocked about £250 off the cost of a sodding great lump of black painted cast iron just because it had been on display. Has the price of scrap cast iron suddenly plummeted in the last few months? Certainly not by that much. Anyway if they want to knock the price down then why should I argue. (Unless of course it was vastly over-priced to start with.)

The brickies finished dishing the floor for the shower and drilled the hole in the wall for the aforemnentioned expensive flue and Duncan went to Kirkwall and ordered the timber flooring. I think that Pam knows how much the flooring will cost but she hasn't told me. I suggested painting the concrete floors. We do not need any sort of covering as there is underfloor heating but apparently we still need to put something expensive on top of the concrete.

At least I think that we are nearly there and next week may see a lot of changes. Then we can probably live in it for a few weeks before it is repossesed to pay for all the "little extras" that we have.

End of whinge for today. You will have to wait until tomorrow for the next installment of superwhinger.