Central Heating

A week off at the end of January

Baggie

Time to squeeze an update in before the end of January?  I think so, especially when I have the excuse that for the last 9 days I have been at home having taken the last of my 2014 leave entitlement.  An F.A. Cup weekend meant that their was no Premier League action and thus it was a perfect time, from a work point of view, to take a break.

So what has 2015 brought to the Bagnall household so far?  The biggest, most important, euphoria inducing event is the fact that our central heating works!  As regular readers may recall one of the problems with our house is that the heating has never truly worked and thus the house has always felt cold.  This was a complete shock to us coming from a  mid-terrace house, with cavity walls and a very efficient heating system.  We called in an expert last winter who said that our system was full of gunk and recommended a power flush.  This he did, cleared out a ton of gunk and although not perfect our house was at least, if not warm not cold.  We thought that was the best it was going to be and thought no more of it over the warm summer months.

The first cold snap of this winter proved that the power flush had not done the job, for although the upstairs of the house was warm, you could see you breath downstairs.  We booked another heating engineer to come round and in the meantime we purloined as many electric heaters as we could to keep the chill out, ignoring the effect on our energy bills!  Chris (the heating engineer was due to come round the week before Christmas but an emergency meant that he had to cancel and instead made us his priority for the first week of 2015.

Without boring you with the minutiae of our heating system, effectively our heating system suffered a coronary.  The fifteen years of gunk had collected in three separate sections of pipework preventing the hot water for reaching our downstairs ring of radiators.  Fortunately, no damage had been done to the boiler, or the pump and after some pipe replacement, cleaning of the system and a few minor adjustments to the design of the system, the house was warm.  The pipes were so full of gunk that there was no clear path through the pipe for the water to flow, no wonder the radiators were cold.  Thankfully, that can fade into the midst of memory and we can now walk around the house without fear of frostbite.

As I have mentioned, and the title alludes, I have had the best part of a week and a half away from work.  Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Lucinda, who was doing her usual hours and the girls who were both at school.  Therefore, we have not been away or done anything overly exciting.  Nevertheless it has been nice being the house husband and spending some time with the family, especially Ezra, who has enjoyed the bulk of my time.  It has also been nice to not only drop the girls off at school, which I do every morning, but to pick them up from school, which I rarely get a chance to do.

We also took the opportunity to have a catch up with Éowyn’s teacher.  As you know Éowyn (and Amélie) moved schools in November and thus we managed to miss parent’s evening (not that the teacher would have been able to tell us much at that point!).  Therefore we asked if we could have a quick catch up after school one evening and this week suited both us and her very well.  She told us that Éowyn has settled in very well and has made some good friends.  Although she is clever, she has a tendency to talk too much and in doing so loses concentration and makes silly mistakes, which is something they are trying to work on as she is also disrupting the children she is talking to.  So we have had a chat with Éowyn to try to curb that side of her personality, but it is something that we can’t do very easily as we are not there, the onus must be with the teaching staff who may have to split her little group up.  Something that happened at her previous school when Éowyn and her best friend were being too loud in class.

The week off, was also well-timed for Granddad.  Lucinda’s dad had ruptured a tendon in his shoulder at the end of last year and has been in terrible pain with it for months.  Fortunately, his operation was scheduled in the middle of my week off so I was able to take him to the hospital.  The operation was bigger than expected and although only a week has passed, John is still in a lot of pain.  However, he has a follow-up appointment on Saturday so should know whether the operation has been a success and whether the pain is to be expected.

The week off was also an opportunity to investigate whether it was possible, and whether I wanted, to have laser surgery to correct my vision.  I am slightly short-sighted but suffer from astigmatism in my left eye.  So took the opportunity to make an appointment and see what the experts say, and probably more importantly how much it would cost.  I never got as far as the second part for during my appointment they discovered that the cornea on the lower part of my left eye is too thin to safely perform laser surgery.  Therefore, it is back to the opticians for me!

As part of my time off I had one of those rare events: a weekend off.  Despite the cold January weather we decided to take full advantage and go on an adventure and visit somewhere new.  We decided on Bocketts Farm and headed down to Leatherhead.  Bocketts Farm is a working farm with play areas to entertain the children.  All three found things to entertain them.  There were trampolines, a soft play area little pedal tractors, all before we managed to see any animals.

Highlights of the day included watching the pig race, getting up close with the small animals in the petting zoo area.  The girls were happy to stroke the rabbit and guinea pigs but weren’t as keen on the thought of stroking the chicken.  However, the apprehension soon faded when the chicken was brought round and they happily stroked her too.  Even Ezra stroked all the animals.

Those highlights were put into the shade by the biggest highlight of the day, for the girls at least, a pony ride.  When they realised that there was the opportunity to ride a pony they both asked if they could queue up.  Well considering the meaning of Éowyn’s name, how could I refuse?  Both of them thoroughly enjoyed it, but thankfully neither have asked for a pony.  Hopefully, that is the way it will stay.  Take the opportunity when presented but not bankrupt daddy by wanting one of your own!

I would thoroughly recommend a trip to Bocketts Farms, especially when it gets a bit warmer as there are plenty of things to do to keep the kids entertained.  We will be going back.

So after some time with the family it is back to work and back to the usual regime.  The first photos of 2015 are on my Flickr pages and see you all in February.

Peace and Love

Baggie

Northern grin
Intense
Cheeky Chappie
Ready to ride
How do you drive this thing?
Looking relaxed
Safety first
Where are we going?
Well, what does my name mean?
Éowyn being lead
Pony Trekking
Lunchtime
I’m going on the slide
Are you ready to catch me?
I’m ready, put the film on

Welcome to 2015

Baggie

It is traditional for my first post of the year to look Janus-like at the year that has just been and one the one yet to come.  Who am I to stand in the way of tradition?

2013 was an extremely hectic year with much of what life can throw at you and so we were hoping for a more sedate 2014.  With 3 children life is never going to be sedate, neither however, was it hectic.  In 2013 life through many things at us including: births, deaths, marriages, holidays, big birthdays, and house moves and although my company relocated (and came under new management) there were no new jobs in the Bagnall household.  It seemed that life was not finished with the Bagnall household and does not conform to the convention of numerical years and almost before the Christmas decorations had found their way back into the loft and certainly before Lucinda had returned to work from maternity leave the news broke that she would have to find a new job.

2014 saw the opening of the new Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport and Air Canada, the company where Lucinda had worked for the past 16 years, was one of the Airlines that was due to make it their new home.  Air Canada though, took this opportunity to look at their accounts and decided to outsource ground control to the handling agency ASIG.  Lucinda therefore had two choices: transfer to ASIG or redundancy.  Since Lucinda had such long service it made sense to take redundancy and then apply to ASIG, hopefully be offered a similar position and try to negotiate favourable terms as an individual.

Thus the stress of returning to work after maternity leave was coupled with the uncertainty of redundancy and job applications.  Nevertheless, Lucinda took it in her stride, took the favourable redundancy package, applied for a position at ASIG and managed to retain her job share hours which ties in, as nicely as it can, with my hours.

My hours have just been ridiculous this year with the conclusion of the move from Chiswick to Uxbridge (doesn’t sound too exotic, does it?) and especially moving Premier League Productions and at the same time taking on another major client in the guise of European Qualifiers.  It is nice to know that we are busy (better than being the opposite) but it would be nice to spend some time with the family.  However 2015 is bring a new structure and hopefully this will free me from the coal face and move me to the management side of my role and thus free me from the shackles of weekend fixtures.

These upheavals in work life have obviously been coupled with the usual stresses of being the parents of three young children and the small matter of moving into a new home.  We had only owned our new home for two months before 2014 was upon us and with Christmas 2013 around the corner all we had time to do was unpack.  Therefore this year was the first chance we had to do anything major with the house.

The house felt homely when we moved in and rooms were allocated almost on our first viewing and a year on they haven’t changed.  Our furniture, however felt dwarfed in the bigger living space and although we didn’t want to clutter the space with furniture for the sake of it we have acquired a few new pieces including the extending table that was used to full effect for Christmas dinner.

We haven’t made too many changes to the house so far, indeed we have only really made three major changes:

  • The installation of photovoltaic panels
  • Painting of the exterior
  • New French doors

The installation of the photovoltaic panels was never a definite plan but something I have always been interested in, especially when I realised how much bigger the fuel bills were for a larger, older house.  When we investigated the various methods to acquire them and how much it would cost to buy an array and we decided that there was no better time than the present. We are earning about £800 a year from them, if this year is at all typical, and our dual fuel bill had dropped by £60/month.  At that rate they will have paid for themselves in less than 6 years (not including any energy price increases) and they are guaranteed for 20 years.  Could be a good little earner;  I’ll keep you informed.

The first thing that we noticed about the house when we came for our initial viewing was the colour.  The house is pebbledashed (something I am not too keen on) and was of the original mortar colour.  Not very exciting, it was a good job that the rest of the house was so good.  We decided as we stood in the driveway in those first minutes that if we  purchase the house that we would like to paint it.

After moving in, it seemed that painting the house was an unnecessary extravagance and we should just live with the colour.  Then the wettest winter in many a year hit (and parts of Staines Upon Thames became Staines up-in-Thames) and the one thing that we noticed (apart from the fact that we were not flooded apparently, we discover we sit on a 1,000 year flood plain) was that there were an awful amount of pebbles on the driveway.  The mortar was absorbing the rain and crumbling.  This then pushed us back to the idea of painting the house.  It would serve two purposes, the first brighten the exterior of the house but secondly and more importantly it would bond the mortar and pebbles and add an extra layer of protection against the elements.

It was about this time that Lucinda was made redundant as Air Canada outsourced ground operations at Heathrow Airport to the handling agency ASIG.  With a nice little bonus in the bank it seemed to be the right thing to do to invest some of it into looking after the house.  So the house is now a Country Cream colour and certainly looks a lot brighter as you drive down the road.

The third improvement has been the replacement of the old sliding patio doors to some modern French doors.  Again it was one of the features of the house that we disliked when we first looked round.  We initially wanted bi-fold doors but apparently our opening wasn’t big enough so we comprised on French doors.  They give us the bigger opening that we wanted, bringing the outdoors in, as the architects are fond of saying, (although not what we particularly want at the moment) but also additional security compared to the sliding style patio doors and additional insulation from the modern double glazing.

Not a bad haul for the first year in our new home.  There are still plenty of things to be done, the most pressing in the heating system.  Last year we had a power flush to try to make the system more efficient and allow the radiators to actually output the heat that they are rated for.  The fact that last Winter was so mild (damp and windy but mild) it had sort of fallen to the back of our minds.  However this winter has already had cold days, and even colder nights and with a lack of heating downstairs, this has become a level one priority.

From a non-expert point of view it seems that there is so much gunk in the system that the hot water can not circulate around the lower half of the system.  Therefore we have hot water and a relatively warm upstairs but no heat downstairs.  This is coupled with single skin walls and a lack of underfloor insulation meaning that it can be unbearably cold downstairs.  Therefore, we have employed oil-filled radiators and fan heaters to attempt to make sitting downstairs bearable, which is denting the savings we would be accruing from the photovoltaic cells installation.

We have a heating engineer coming round in the week to see what he can do.  It might involve new radiators and pipework.  Hopefully not a new boiler but if it is needed, then it is needed.  To help retain the heat in the house we will also be looking at underfloor insulation in the coming year but that is going to be a big job and probably involve new carpets (or floor covering of some sort).  That however, can wait until the spring and be in place for next winter.

This past year has also seen our first attempt at cultivation.  Not in a self-sufficiency kind of way but just to see if we enjoy it and to help teach the children where our food comes from.  We were relatively successful with runner beans (there are still some in the freezer), potatoes, tomatoes and raspberries.  Not so successful with strawberries (squirrels dug the plants up before they had a chance to grow) and pumpkins (only one survived until Halloween).  The main thing was that we enjoyed doing it and managed to eat our produce so let’s see if we can do better next year.

The first event of last year that I would like to mention was the fact that in moving home we were further from Éowyn’s school but only a short walk to another.  Therefore, we made the decision to move sc

hools.  This was confirmed by the local education authority at michaelmas half term.  There have been tears and she is not enjoying it as much as she was at her old school, but we are confident that it will not take her much longer to settle it, especially with everyone returning after the Christmas break.

Amélie, on the other hand, is positively enjoying her new pre-school and looks forward to going to her ‘new school’.  The fact that both schools are a short walk from home and they can ride their scooters their, we think is a huge positive too.  There are also around 4 or 5 other families in the street with children of the same age so we feel more part of a community than we ever did at the previous school.  If only Éowyn’s best friend and favourite teacher were at this school then there would not be a problem, but life is not like that.

2014 has been another interesting year in the Bagnall household and I am sure that 2015 will just as interesting. Plans that we have will come to fruition and I am sure that this will be coupled with unforeseen obstacles that life will throw at us that will need to be overcome.  No doubt some things will go smoothly and others will be more bumpy; some things will fall into place without too much planning while others will fail despite being planned to the nth degree, and on that note I would like to leave you with this thought from Neil Gaiman:

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”

Peace and Love

Baggie

PS.  2013 saw disappointment surrounding Comet ISON which strayed too close to the sun, denying us a promised ‘Comet of the Century’ experience.  January brings us, not a ‘Comet of a Century’ but with luck and the benefit of a dark sky you maybe lucky enough to see Comet Lovejoy that should become visible to those of us in the Northern Hemisphere from the 9th January reaching perihelion on Friday 30th January 2015.  Keep those eyes peeled.

PPS.  Geeky web stats for 2014 can be found here.

Happy New Year from the Baguettes
Happy New Year from the Baguettes

Bongo, bongo stylee

Baggie

After an early hat-trick of updates at the beginning of November this site has been a little quiet.  Three weeks into our new home I thought it was perhaps times to rectify this and give you a little insight to the life of the Bagnalls in the new Bagnall manor.

November was always going to be a busy month.  A wave of productions were due to relocate from Chiswick to our company’s new base at Stockley Park and a number of these involved Live Operations (and hence me and my team) including the Football League Show.  Therefore if there was one month I didn’t want to move home it was November.  Unfortunately fate conspired against me and so a busy month at work coincided with the move.  With no opportunity to take leave, the relocation of the family was done on days off and hence we are still mainly in boxes.

Although I, personally, have not had much time to settle into the new abode it does feel like home.  Again that is despite the fact that we still have dozens of unpacked boxes and the heating isn’t working.  Yes, the biggest problem that we have faced is the fact that the temperature has dropped close to freezing point over night and the heating has serious issues.  We have had heating engineers around who both have confirmed that the system is full of gunk and thus the hot water is not filling the radiators.  The good news is that the boiler works as does the pump, however that hot water is not reaching the radiators and thus downstairs, especially, is barely warmer than outside.  Unfortunately due the design of the hot water system it is not the easiest of systems to service and that design is part of the issue, there are lots of turns and u-bends where gunk can gather.  Fortunately phase one has begun and now the radiators take the chill out of the room (I wouldn’t say it is tropical but at least it is a step in the right direction) and hopefully the chemicals in the system carry on dissolving the gunk and allow the hot water to do its job.

Apart from the heating, we are as much in love with the house now as when we first looked round it. There are only a couple of minor annoyances that we hadn’t noticed when we looked round: a)  the kitchen light switch is located behind the door, so as you walk into the room, you have to then close the door before you can switch the light on.  Why do people do that?  It is so annoying, surely when you are designing a room you automatically place the light switch on the opposite wall to the door hinge so that you can open the door with one hand while simultaneously turning the light on with the other and b) the hot water tap in the downstairs shower room (hark at us – downstairs shower room!) opens clockwise and closes counterclockwise which is the opposite direction to every other tap in the house including the cold water tape on the same sink.  These are minor annoyances and the kitchen light switch will be changed when we manage to scrap enough spare cash together to redesign the kitchen.

The girls have settled in well too.  They do not notice the cold (something that we have to watch for as they wander downstairs with no dressing gown or slippers on).  They do not seem even to miss the old house, which is nice.  They have settled in quite quickly and both are happy to use the extra space that the house offers to run around and play hide and seek.  Their playroom is coming together and now we have just got to encourage them that their toys live in there (or in their bedroom) and are to be put away each night in the new boxes we have bought them.  Let’s see how that goes.

So while I have been busy at work, the girls have been busy at school.  Éowyn, especially has been excelling at school, she has begun to read and write and is brilliant at breaking words into their letter and then blending the sounds together.  It is great to sit with her and see how excited she is when she reads a sentence.  It is quite exciting for her parents too!  She also has a line in the Christmas play, but more of that in the December write up.  Needless to say there is plenty of practising  She knows it off by heart and now we are working on projection.  Éowyn wants to take it one stage further though and has started making up some actions to help emphasise the words, building her part up!  We have a little diva.  There is no truth in the rumours that her rider includes 23 orange smarties and a bunch of daffodils.

Although it has been a busy month at work, there was one ‘dark weekend’ and my friend and colleague cleverly chose that weekend to get married.  John and Sara have lots of friends that have small children so their wedding was organised with children in mind and as a consequence my invite also included an invite for Éowyn, Amélie and Ezra.

John and Sara were married at St John’s the Evangelist in Blackheath and therefore the shortest (it turned out not to be the quickest route) was to drive through the centre of London.  It was a great opportunity to point out the Natural History Museum, Buckingham Place, The Houses of Parliament and the Tower of London.  There were colouring books and pencils to keep the children entertained during the ceremony and afterwards there was cake and bubbles.  Then it was on to the reception at Devonport Hotel at Greenwich.  This is where the beauty of the S-Max comes into its own.  One of my colleagues, Matt, was going to have difficulty getting from one venue to the other, so with our seven-seater beast we could offer him a lift.

Now, Éowyn and Amélie have started to make up their own language and phrases.  Bongo, bongo Stylee is one of them (it means something that is very good), others are more nonsensical.  One day going to school they were talking to each other in one of these made up languages so I started to join in and they thought it was one of the funniest things that they had ever heard.  So now they will ask me to talk in my made-up language.

So on the way to reception the girls requested that I spoke my made up language.  So I strung together a line of vowels and consonants into an amusing set of words and they started laughing.  Matt thought that he would join in and copied what I had done.  Amélie, however turned to him and said, ‘Matt, you’re not even funny!‘  Put into your place by a three year old, how we laughed!

Ezra, too can be amusing and seems to be a ladies man.  He is forever trying to catch the eye of the ladies and with his blue eyes and cheeky smile he tends to melt their hearts.  Sometimes he is not content with just a smile though.  In a restaurant a week or so ago, he had caught the eye of a couple of ladies and they were cooing over him.  However they turned away from him and begun talking to each other, Ezra was not happy.  He started calling out to them, getting more and more agitated.  When they turned to see what he was doing, he immediately stopped shouting and just looked at them and gave them a big blue-eyed smile!  He is going to break hearts if he continues like that!  His latest smile is even cuter as he screws his eyes up as he grins.  I will try and get a photo.

Unfortunately we have all been fighting a winter cold.  Éowyn was the first to succumb, although we were not convinced at first.  The Bagnalls are the kind of family that do not stop for a mere cold, so when Éowyn had a bit of a cough we gave her some cough syrup, wrapped her up warm and sent her to school.  We were surprised when Lucinda received a call on a Tuesday afternoon to say that Éowyn had vomited and would we collect her.  Lucinda asked her why she had vomited and Éowyn told a different story, namely that she had accompanied one of her friends to the toilet and (I quote Éowyn directly) ‘She did a smelly poo and it make me sick.‘  Therefore thinking that there was nothing in it, we sent her to school the next day.  School must have thought that we were bad parents and immediately called Lucinda to collect her again, saying that when a pupil had vomited they needed to be off school for 24 hours.

Thursday morning came and we sent her to school.  Her cough had got a little worse but nothing too much to worry about.  However at lunch Éowyn had a coughing fit while eating and once again vomited.  So the bad parents were called back and they requested that Éowyn stay at home the next day.  Thus Éowyn will not receive a 100% attendance certificate for the next half term.

So as we settle into our new home we haven’t had many visitors (we are still in boxes and it is a little cold) but the first of my friends to visit has one of the longest journeys.  Sanjiv, was over in England for a couple of weeks from his home in New Delhi (India for those of you with an F in geography) and we managed to meet up (for the first time in ages) and he came round to look at our new home and also to meet the family.  Éowyn was a baby the last time he met them, now we have Amélie and Ezra – how scary is that?  It was good to see him and it illustrates how we let life get in the way of living, years seem to pass so quickly and before you know it, friends’ children are going to university.  Surely I am not that old?  Although I have just ‘celebrated’ 18 years at IMG.  I can now employ people that were not born when I started at IMG in November 1995!

With those thoughts I will leave you and see you in December!

Peace and Love

Baggie

PS Apologies for the lack of decent photos, have been a little busy, I will try harder for the next update.

Cute smile for Zebra
Smile for Mommy!
Look at my teeth!
Smiler!
Cheeky boy
First meal in the new house
Bagnall manor
John and Sara cut the cake
Matt eats the cake!