Yesterday I replaced the ageing heating thermostat (a rotary-style Honeywell) with a nice shiny digital one – a Horstmann Centaurstat 7, in fact.  It has quite a sophisticated built-in programmer (more so than our existing programmer, at least) and will hopefully prevent the over-heating problem we’ve had here since we moved in.  I found that the old thermostat was calling for heat at a higher temperature than selected (3-4 degrees higher), causing someone (me) to turn the thermostat up in the morning, causing someone else (Charlie) to complain in the evening when it became too hot.

Anyway, that’s mostly irrelevant – it’s kind of worrying when the purchase of a new thermostat gets you excited!

The cable connected to the old thermostat was surface-mounted in a length of trunking, which looked pretty ugly.  It’s now buried in the wall, and if it wasn’t for the slight difference in paint, you probably wouldn’t know (although I probably would tell you).

What made me laugh was that when I removed the old thermostat, I found it had been attached to the wall with… NAILS!  In fact, two nails, each a different type.  Just in case one was the wrong type, the other would have a chance of being the right type, I guess.  I may be alone in this, but I don’t feel an electrical device should be nailed to anything!

I’ve seen it all now.  Holes drilled in the bathroom all the way through the wall into the bedroom (and then plugged with garden cane), doorsteps ‘damp-proofed’ with black bin bags (and attached with nails), electrical cables cut and left loose under floorboards, sudden 90-degree bends in buried cabling…

We still have the loft to tackle and a spare room, a dining room, a bathroom, a kitchen, a hallway, and a landing that are as-yet relatively unexplored.  I’m sure there will be more ‘surprises’ for us to find.

The latest ‘quick job’ that turned out to be anything but quick, was replacing our side gate. We haven’t used it since we moved into the house back in mid-2007, mainly because we didn’t have–or couldn’t find (or, probably more accurately, didn’t look for)–the key. We assumed that since we couldn’t open it, neither could anyone else (without breaking it down), and it was therefore as secure as a side gate could be expected to be.

Well that theory fell through when we noticed that the wet weather had finally penetrated the wood of the door, and it had started to rot and bow, leaving a large gap between the door and the frame. Since it was visible from the street, replacement was necessary.

I went ahead and ordered a new wooden door from B&Q, and all the hinges, locks, handles and screws necessary to fit it from Wickes. Oh, and some paint. I’ve never painted anything external before, so I got some primer, some undercoat, and a gloss topcoat. It is no longer funny to see how many cans of paint we have in our utility room.

On a sidenote, it turned out that the door was actually a hollow internal door, and the top and bottom edges weren’t painted. The door was so soft and damp that I can’t dispose of it yet. It will either dry out in the sun, at which point I can get it to the tip, or the rain will wash most of it away.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the rot had spread to the door frame as well, and wouldn’t have supported the forces of a door being opened and closed. And replacing the door frame is not something I wanted to do, since the two courses of brickwork above the door are not supported by a lintel. They sit directly on the door frame. Nice.

So, back out to Wickes I go, to buy some external plywood to board the door up. A packet of woodscrews and a few coats of paint later, it looks just like a door, but without a handle. Or hinges. Or the functionality.

And we now have a spare half-painted door that we need to store…

Two weeks’ work, and almost £8k. And that’s just for upstairs.

Drat. We can’t take that on right now. Double-drat.

But now we know that the small, independant trades we asked to quote on various things seem to be put off by big jobs. Moving a soil pipe, laying a concrete floor, knocking a wall down, and removing a chimney breast; just a few of the ‘little’ things we wanted done.

Maybe it’s time to rethink our plans.