ROTTEN FRONT FENCE CRISIS

Whilst most people are shivering in their flimsy underpants during Black Ice Friday, I’ve been obsessing over the ‘Rotten Front Fence’ crisis.

This rotten old fence has got to go

Unlike this new Labour lot, I’ve prioritised my various first world problems then properly worked out my budget for each one. Since the Government decided that throwing cash they don’t have is the best approach to dealing with issues, then I’m taking a leaf out of their book and doing the same.

The Rotten Front Fence crisis is a fully funded project; the result of a few car boot sales, Ebay listings and raids on pension pots. Every penny scraped together from under sofa cushions or yellow ticket savings on the food shop. (Not beans on toast again!!)

Super scrimping paid for this little lot

An Englishman’s home is his castle and as feudal lady of my country pile, you’d think you could do what you like with your fence but not so. There’s those pesky ‘rules’ no-one knows about until they embark on these projects that always crop up to bite you in the bum.

Would you believe, there’s rules that apply to the heights of front garden fences? You can’t just throw up any old fence said the landscaper. You’ll have to ring the Council to find out how high you’re allowed to go. What! Surely, I can go as high as 2 metres without planning permission? Apparently not out front.

Now ringing the local Planning Department is a lot easier said than done. For starters there’s the problem of actually speaking to a human being. If you can survive the complicated voicemail system repeatedly telling you to use the Council’s website and get through to someone without claiming your state pension first then you’ve successfully passed the first test.

The second labour of Hercules is finding someone who actually knows about planning rules and is not going to fob you off with the promise of a call back that never happens.

Once you’ve gotten through to that person, the third labour of Hercules is being prepared to navigate the complexities of the Planning Portal – a website subject to more interpretations than the Big Bang Theory. Planning personnel appear incapable of answering straightforward questions over the phone and will instead fob you off to this hallowed portal, the answer of planning life, the universe and everything.

Of course, mere mortals can’t get a handle on the vagaries of planning rules and their myriad ‘interpretations’ listed on the Planning Portal so eventually you lose the will to live and resort to paying the £118 entry fee to the ‘Do I Need Planning Permission’ process. I suspect this is what all Councils want you to do in the first place, as it’s a nice little earner for them but a very expensive way to get an answer to the simple question – how high can my new front fence be?

It takes around 15 days to get a response under this process, delays which at this time of year can be critical. Icy or wet conditions can properly scupper your project for weeks.

Meanwhile back on my feudal manor, another dragon to slay. This time its utilities. ‘Madam, it’s your responsibility to get all the gas and electrical services traced as we’re not going to be held responsible for pranging them’ said the landscaper. Really? As I’m not the one wielding the jackhammer then surely you can’t be suggesting that I’ll be to blame?

If replacing a fence, be prepared to spend some time contacting Southern Gas Networks or the Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks to ask for drawings or to request pipe or cable tracing. This service is provided free of charge and a human being will actually turn up to spray paint your driveway/garden to mark the location of any utility assets in the vicinity.

This turned out to be very important since plans showed both a high and low voltage cable was running in the neighbour’s garden about 2 feet from the boundary line and the gas service feeding the meter was running along our driveway on the other side.

Needless to say, after waiting for at least 6 weeks for all this palaver to be sorted out, we are now the proud owners of a new front fence.

Preparing to move the gate forward

The existing garden gate has been moved closer to the front of the house making the side of the property more secure and with a slightly higher fence, a bit more private.

New gate and 3ft fence replaced by 4ft one

Certainly a vast improvement on the old fence and sturdy enough to withstand a good battering from Storm Bert.

Finished just before the storm arrived

LOFT ART GALLERY OPENS

The thing no-one tells you when buying a chalet style house is how poorly insulated they are. They’re continually cold, particularly upstairs where bedrooms are often of the ‘room in roof’ variety and severely lacking in proper insulation-backed plasterboard or other means of heat retention.

Not quite an igloo but bloody cold inside

It’s all down to construction methods and materials used back when these types of homes were built. These days property developers have stringent building regs to comply with when it comes to insulation, back then I guess builders weren’t so bothered about their prospective buyers not being eskimos.

No matter that I’ve just spent a small fortune adding extra padding or boarding, the loft still remains colder than Siberia.

Holy moly or rather holey moly. Sit in your loft with the lights out. Go on, I dare you! You can see daylight from a million tiny gaps around the eaves or between roof tiles. It’s no wonder it’s so parky up here when the place is like a giant slab of Emmental cheese. Brrrr!!!

Almost as many holes as the loft

In the ideal world and with money to spare, it would be worth thinking about pitched roof insulation or re-felting but in the meantime prospective visitors to the newly inaugurated loft art gallery will just have to wear a thick duvet-like jumper or fleecy bed-socks.

Like the Tate Modern but colder

Maybe I should just turn the loft into a giant wine cellar although I doubt any vino laid down in this ready made wine cooler would last long enough to get warmed up by any summer sunshine.

LOFTY AMBITIONS

The sky’s the limit or in our case, the loft is.  Not exactly NASA standards but still high enough for a diddy person like me.  Getting up the loft ladder is certainly one large step for mankind! 

The space race is on to vacate our storage unit before 6 January 25 and whilst this date sounds miles out into the future, in reality it’s only 7 weeks away.  That’s 7 whole weeks of trawling through dusty boxes, sorting the wheat from the chaff to donate, dump or dispose of anything not likely to be needed in our lifetimes.  

Even after 3 years of slow distilling, there are still a surprising number of boxes left in the storage unit in spite of my ruthless culling.  Like gremlins they seem to multiply if you feed them after midnight and who knows what goes on in these storage units in the wee hours.

Now that the loft has been re-boarded it certainly looks more spacious. I started this week sucking cobwebs from the rafters (a disgusting job) and brushing sawdust from the flooring in a bid to tidy things up before getting down to my latest project – creating a loft art gallery.

Loads of space to clutter up

The thing about downsizing is you lose wall space as well as surplus bedrooms resulting in an excess of pictures, posters and photos with nowhere to go. There’s only so many of these you can hang in the habitable parts of the house so the rest are destined for the two walls at each end of the loft.

Hmm - can I do something with this wall?

A couple of cans of bargain masonry paint later and the loft walls are now looking a lot cleaner and spider free than they were a few weeks ago.

Vail masonry paint - an off white/stone colour

The perfect blank canvas for our collection of pictures, posters and photos with nowhere else to go.

All ready for picture hanging

MARS

Mars – the bringer of war, chocolate bar, Bruno or yet another amazing creation by celebrated artist Luke Jerram.

Once again, Chichester Cathedral hosted another of Luke’s incredible planetary art installations and Mars was no less stunning than either Gaia or the Moon.

Gaia - planet earth

The Moon

Wonder in silence at this mesmerising red globe spinning in its ecclesiastical orbit.

Mars - Chichester Cathedral

Ponder on its strange pock-marked exterior, its circular craters could almost have been created by a million pebbles simultaneously hitting the surface of an interstellar pond.

Strangely mesmerising

Beautiful red ambient lighting

What are all these strange rock formations?

Is there life on Mars? And if so, what would they make of all our antics here on earth?

Matt Damon?

I hope Luke will continue on his solar quest and fashion further planets. Imagine how spectacular Saturn might look or a big blue Neptune?

I’m not going to mention Uranus …. No-one wants to see that!

Recommend an evening viewing so if you haven’t already been then please go see it, otherwise catch his next exhibition if or when it comes back again.

Truly stunning

THE 'BROKEN' CRISIS

Funny how everything these days is either ‘broken’ or in a state of ‘crisis’. We’re living through a housing crisis, energy crisis, immigration crisis, climatic crisis and everything from the NHS to the special educational needs system in schools is broken. It’s no wonder people are quivering under their duvets like anxious jellies, ready to jump out of their skins in fright at the latest news headlines. Lately life feels like an endless rollercoaster of fear with humanity lurching from one catastrophe to the next. Ugh!!

Who broke these things? Not me Guv. You could spend a lifetime going round and round in circles looking to point the finger at this or that but you’ll never really find out why it’s all gone to pot.

Life’s been a constant whirl. It’s almost a month since my last post and I too have been lurching from one first world ‘crisis’ to another trying desperately to balance the books for all household projects currently in the pipeline. I sympathise with the Chancellor who is going through the same thing but on a grander scale.

There’s the ‘Lack of Heat Retention Upstairs’ crisis caused by the ‘broken’ loft. The carpenter is up there at the moment busily stuffing joists with Rockwool insulation before fitting new OSB boards in a bid to stem the flow of energy dosh haemorrhaging into the ether from our inadequately insulated loft.

So that's where all that money went

The freshly insulated loft should also herald the end of the ‘Being In Storage’ crisis which has drained more cash out of my pay packet than sewage discharged into Chi harbour. What a money pit these storage places are! In hindsight, if I’d known we’d spend the first three years of our new Chi life using storage facilities, I’d have started by insulating the loft first then refurbishing the rest of the house. Would have saved a small fortune!

Then there’s the ‘Rotten Front Fence’ crisis caused by next door’s invasive ivy, years of underfunded waterproofing treatment and poor installation in the first place. If ever there was something that is truly broken then look no further. It’s only the ivy and copious amounts of Cuprinol slapped on since we moved in that’s holding it all together. I’ve booked the landscapers for the end of November then I can kiss goodbye to another £1,500!

On it's last legs

And finally, there’s the ‘I Want To Refurbish The Downstairs Toilet’ crisis. Imagine peeing whilst squatting on an iceberg – yes that’s our downstairs loo. As cold as a penguin’s chuff. A room that no-one really wants to hang about in longer than necessary except the other half who spends half the day in there reading the Spectator whilst keeping Dyno-Rod in gainful employment.

Time for a toilet tune up

Having taken a hammer and chisel to the wall tiles, the room is now as broken as the NHS Dental service although at least there’s a definite fix for this issue. More about that project in later posts.

I've broken it

So as the festive season approaches, my bank account is emptying faster than Santa’s sack, my patience is wearing thin and the constantly boiled kettle has depleted the National Grid. Soon there’ll be a global tea shortage as I’ll have drunk most of it in a bid to keep my crisis battered self from going completely bonkers!