2021

“Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not”.

Bill Gates

Gentle readers may recall – should they have little better to do – that much earlier in the year all the talk in this forum was of major renovations to the basement of our splendid peninsula home. Some of those readers may well have already stayed with us in our basement and they might well concur that a little improvement would not go amiss.

The details of our thinking in this regard were first outlined in my usual annual ‘looking ahead‘ post way back in January. Sadly this later update – posted during May – gives chapter and verse as to how and why those earlier plans went up in smoke, largely as a result of the iniquitous increase in the price of raw materials – fueled by the pandemic – which saw the cost of our proposed refurbishment more than double.

At the time of writing prices have fallen back slightly but it is clearly going to be some time before they revert to sensible levels – assuming that they ever so do.

All was not entirely lost, however. Though even our stripped back renovation proposal was outwith any price we were prepared to pay, we have been effecting some more minor – but none the less important – home improvements throughout the summer.

As part of our major rebuild back in 2017 we replaced all bar three of our windows and sliders (patio doors). The reason that we did not do the last few was that we were at the time perilously close to exhausting our budget. Anyway – the long and the short of it is that they have all now been done, including this rather splendid new casement for my studio:

That should keep things a little warmer during the winter months!

We also finally lost our patience with our alarm system. Most houses here have such systems, not only for security purposes but also for the all important fire safety (these are mostly wood-framed houses after all). We inherited the contract for the old system when we purchased the property and it has been exhibiting the usual signs of technology that is about to expire – all manner of chirps and klaxons going off in the middle of the night as sensors fail.

The provider of this ailing system is based in the US rather than being local (the which would have been our preferred choice) and their call centre distinctly gives the impression of being somewhere even further south than that. I got fed up with spending hours on the phone to a foreign country whilst a most helpful but hard to comprehend operative tried to diagnose the problem without being able to see what was going on.

Enough was enough – we switched to a local company and they came and installed lots of shiny new hardware (at the same time covering our estate liberally with stickers and signs announcing that they are the new incumbents in the alarm system stakes).

So far – so good!

Finally – The Girl has long been advocating for our shop (garden shed, for UK readers) to be given a new coat of paint. Following the repainting of the exterior of the house last year we had a fair bit of each colour paint left and it was a no-brainer to give the shed a colour-coordinated update.

This has duly been done and very nice it looks too: