garage conversion – Mkingdon's Blog

A week full of emulsion.

30/01/2011 by mkingdon, posted in Garage Conversion, mkingdon

It has been a while since I have commented on our viewing habits, courtesy of our Tesco DVD Rental deliveries.

This week, we were pretty happy to get two titles that looked promising. We usually like our weekend DVDs to be of a blockbuster style, nothing too challenging (subtitles are a no go), and sit back and let them entertain us.

With this in mind, Knight and Day and The Expendables seemed likely to tick all those boxes. Both had a decent star quota and had been advertised to death upon release.

They were both atrocious!!

Knight & Day was slightly better, and we did manage to get all the way through it. The Expendables however was absolutely shockingly bad. It takes a lot for me to abandon a film before the end, but I simply had to. Louise had long since fallen asleep, as we watched it on our new TV in our new bedroom (I’ll come to this shortly), and I waded through about an hour before realising that my mind was wandering, and I really could not give a toss what happened next.

The script was so cringingly crass and hackneyed I was almost predicting the next line, and the story was cheesy, predictable and had been done a million times before. The cinematography was of the type where everything is dark, so you can never really tell what is going on, and with Sly Stallone in the lead role, most of the audio was so unintelligible that you had to have the volume at max, only then to be blown away by the next explosion or gun shot.

Knight & Day was OK. Again, a premise that had been done a million times. An agent who is indestructible, amazing at fighting, shooting and stuff, with a good-looking blonde tagging along. It had all the ingredients for a decent action/romcom, but something about it just didn’t work for me. The story was weak, and of course some of the action was so far-fetched it rivalled Con Air!!

These few hours being my only break from the paint brush since Wednesday made their crapness a real bugger!! I have a right arm like Popeye’s, but not for the reasons you may think. No, I have been painting stuff for so long, my arm keeps moving whilst I sleep. I have glossed the equivalent of a football pitch. We have more wood in our house than the Playboy mansion on party night!

My estimate of the decorating taking two days, leaving me Friday to relax was so off the mark, it made Andy Gray’s views look accurate.

Anyway, I get ahead of myself. This was the week when the garage officially became our bedroom.

My brain has been wrecked with the best part of five days of intense paint fumes, so the final stages of the project have become a little hazy, but last night, for the first time we slept in our new bedroom. It all felt a bit odd to be honest, and after what seems like forever from when we kicked this off, to be finally in did not quite sink in.

I had christened th’en suite shower earlier (not like that!!), and what great pleasure I took from it (I said not like that!). Washing away days of engrained gloss and emotion, I mean emulsion, and with them the aches and pains of painting ceilings and all sorts of nooks and crannies at weird angles, felt very good.

The one slight pain point in our new bedroom is that we do not as yet have anything to cover the windows!! Our custom-made blinds are two weeks away yet, and so getting in and out of bed requires a very impressive commando roll on to the floor, where I quickly assume my dressing gown. Don’t get me wrong, if the neighbours want to see me in all my glory then they are welcome. I am only thinking of them believe me!! Our new window is so HUUGGEE that we cannot buy mere mortal window coverings, no, we have to drop a massive wad on custom made blinds.

Anyway, in my decorating marathon, I have realised there are a set of rules for it –

1. You will never buy enough paint and have to go to the shop covered in paint with just a little bit left to do

2. No matter whether you think glossing or emulsioning first is the right thing to do, you will think you made the wrong decision when you have to cut in the latter application to the former.

3. No matter how many times you stand back to check your work, before packing everything away, it is only when you have cleaned all the brushes, put them away and had a shower that you will see that bit you missed

4. Your partner coming home from work and criticising a small element of your eight hours of painting is likely to result in divorce at best, and cold-blooded murder at worst.

5. You will find gloss under your fingernails for the next three weeks.

6. You will somehow end up with more paint on your clothes than on the walls.

Anyway, I am finally done, and all we need now is a set of wardrobes to complete the room, and this will allow us to move all our stuff downstairs. Rebecca has moved in to our old room upstairs and is loving the extra room. She is as I type painting stuff on her walls. I think it is getting a Hello Kitty treatment, but to be honest if I see another paint brush this side of Christmas I will not be responsible for my actions.

So a landmark week in the Williams household. I must say that if you fancy something else where your garage currently is, and you live near me then you should consider the chaps who did ours, Nuspace. They were excellent!

But, something that tops all these events, something that should be recorded in history. Emily is out tonight at a gig at the Apollo in Manchester. She is watching A Day to Remember. Who??

That is not the event to which I refer. No, after said gig, someone else is picking her up and bringing her home. I know!! I could not quite believe it myself. I shall still have to wait up for her, but I think I shall embarrass her by waiting in bed and then jumping up as she arrives and waving frantically at the window. I may even wave my hands too.

So it is back to work tomorrow after three days off last week, and my Inbox looks horrific. I looked at it earlier but did not have the heart to actually do anything about it. For now, I have realxing to do.

Till the next time…..

Germans & Trenches!

05/12/201007/12/2010 by mkingdon, posted in Garage Conversion, mkingdon

The highlight of the week was without doubt the return of Rebecca from Germany.

She had been a mixture of homesick, tearful, joyous and most things in between throughout the ten-day trip, and so we were very glad to welcome her home on Friday evening. She arrived with a case full of dirty clothes and presents from “her german’s” family. For some reason they were all ginger based, with several different variations on the theme of ginger cake. That is in no way a complaint, any gift ending with the word cake is welcome in our house.

She had of course “fallen in love” with a German boy whilst over there, and within hours of her return was missing him. Having longed to come home for half the trip, she was very soon wishing she was back over there!! This was not helped by an incident involving her phone. You may remember a few weeks ago that she got a new Nokia E5? Well, just before she left for Germany she reported issues with it, but we didn’t have time to get it sorted before her departure.

As 99% of her phone use is text based, which was working fine, she managed whilst away. On her return I phoned Orange and they diagnosed it as faulty, and impressively said a new one would be with us tomorrow. Saying that I called them at around 7.00pm, that was pretty good. So true to their word a new handset arrived the following morning, and we had to hand back the broken one. Retaining the battery, sim and memory card was however not enough to preserve all Rebecca’s contacts, and the text messages she had from Tom, the boy from Germany!

She was devastated! I felt awful, and she is now in the process of sourcing all her missing contacts, but can’t get her texts back. This was not a “Dad of the Year” moment I can tell you.

As is the way, she seems to have got over it now.

This week also saw the snow finally arrive in the North West. We have been a pocket of resistance against the seemingly unstoppable snow until the back end of the week. I wouldn’t claim to be snowed in, but even the threat of snow caused a two and a half hour journey to work on Monday (I travel twelve miles), so on Thursday with actual white stuff on the ground, I elected to work from home.

This wasn’t an option earlier in the week as the garage work has well and truly started, and this manifested itself, in the first day or so, in a complete lack of central heating, as the plumber moved the boiler to a new location. Had it stayed where it was, it would have been in our future shower!

Garage Trench — Our poo will go through that!

Safe in the knowledge that the house would be warm, Thursday at home was productive, if not dust filled, as the first week of the job, it turned out, involved lots of digging, to put in drains and soil pipes to remove our future ablutions. So watching this also made me very, very happy to be an office drone. Tedious it may be, but at least it is warm. Watching the chaps trying to dig a trench through a concrete floor in sub-zero temperatures more than convinced me that I am in the right place. Yes they may enjoy the four days of summer more than I, but the pay off is simply not worth it.

Temperatures were so low during this work that they broke three digger machine things!

Our house, it will not surprise you is a mess. The assurances that the work would be contained within the garage were ambitious. Dust gets everywhere, and we temporarily have a washer and dryer in the middle of the kitchen until they can replumb them into their future homes.

Saturday morning, early, I was out in my finest bobble hat, digging out Louise’s mini from the snow. The need for food was probably the only possible reason that I would undertake such work willingly. The mini was the weapon of choice as it seems to cope far better with these conditions than the marauding beast that is the Mondeo.

Louise returned a little later with enough food to survive a nuclear winter, so we should be OK should we get any more snow.

So with a house with a look of Beruit we naturally went out on Saturday to get our Christmas tree! After years of falsies, we went for a real one this year. The main driver behind this decision was that the good old fake one lived in the garage, and now with that becoming a bedroom, it had no home and had to go. It was about the same age as the kids, so it was time.

So battling road conditions, and the urge to stay in the warm, Louise and I went to the local Garden Centre, and picked one out. The cavernous world of the Mondeo boot proved essential once again, as it easily swallowed up the 6ft tree, and laughed in my face, as if this would be any sort of test. I’ll be finding pine needles in there for about six months.

The decoration of said tree took hardly any time at all. The lights worked first time, and crucially, and unusually, did not take the customary three hours to unravel. I always put them away wound up nice and neat, but at some point in the intervening months some bugger finds them and ties them into un-doable knots!

Louise had been to John Lewis earlier in the week and spent an obscene amount on specific baubles, so these are all that adorn the tree. Most years we have everything plus the kitchen sink on the old false one, as it was huge. The minimal look is a winner on all counts!

The Louise update this week is that she did not return to work as planned. The doctor wanted to do some more tests, for the “other thing” she may need an operation for, and therefore suggested she stay off until those are done, and they know what they are going to do. The plan now is for a return on the 14th of December. She did however get some good news this week. She had word from work that she has now completed her NVQ Level 3 Health. With her health woes this has been a fine achievement, and hopefully once back at work, will mean progression, and of course some more cash!!

Health wise she is pretty much fully operational now, as evidenced by her shopping ability. In fact having her back in work for four days a week may be welcome to restrict the amount of time available to her to demonstrate this in retail establishments around the North West.

To complete the family round up, Emily is building up for her mocks, and should be revising. She assures us she is, and only has two days left at school this term, as the rest of the time is taken up with the mocks themselves, or study days. Unluckily for her, Louise will be at home to make sure these are not Facebook and MSN days!! Life is cruel sometimes.

So with the weather looking like this outside….

The plan for this afternoon is to stay indoors with the TV and the Xbox, and enjoy some lunch which will no doubt involve something of a ginger nature.

Till the next time…..

Trifle and time machines.

21/11/201021/11/2010 by mkingdon, posted in Garage Conversion, mkingdon

Welcome back from France!

The last three posts have been a mini trip report of my time at DLRP, but fear not, these tales of exotic travels are at an end and we can get back to the really important stuff like how much I don’t want to go to work, my life of woe as the world turns against me, and my life as taxi driver and bank for the girls. What more could you want?

Whilst we have all been away in France not a great deal has happened that I need update you on. Garage wise not much has progressed as we still await a resolution to our gas issues. Not an unfamiliar state for me. At least now we have a date, and that date is the 29th of November. With that in mind work actually starts on the 1st of December.

My efforts to ready the garage for the arrival of work men have long been documented via Twitter and this blog, and we are now seeing light at the end of tunnel, not to mention some floor space. Previously, with the garage chock full of essential crap, every inch of floor space has been occupied.

After one fully loaded Mondeo, and a trip to the tip, yesterday saw me “break the back” of ridding us of about nine years worth of hording. It didn’t all go. Some stuff we want to keep has been redistributed to other areas of the house, where it can gather dust for another nine years. But the stuff retained is worth it, as it was memory stuff. Photos, school books, paintings by the kids, from a time when we could decide what they wore, and how their hair was.

Browsing through some of that stuff did delay the task yesterday. There was a fair amount of head shaking, and wondering where the time went.

For those who plan to still be reading this nonsense in a few weeks time, the picture above, and the one below shall serve as the befores, compared to what will be several lovely looking afters at which we can all bill and coo.

Speaking of wondering where the time went, earlier this week on Thursday, Louise and I spent the evening at school, attending an open evening for the sixth form college, as somehow she is now in her final year at school!!! Seriously, how did this happen? It was only last month that I was sat on a miniature chair in the school hall of the local Infant school, fretting at my eldest striking out on the scary road of attending school.

The night was very helpful, and it only took about half an hour for Emily to choose the subjects she wants to do at A level. It was at this point that I officially became old. I used the phrase “in my day”, whilst trying to explain to Emily that when I chose my A levels, I had a choice of boring traditional subjects, such as English, History, and I pushed the envelope by also taking Economics.

Our quick tour of the sixth form’s TV studio, editing suite and gallery convinced Emily to take Media Studies and Film Studies. A further chat with another member of staff, and she added Photography to the list, having dismissed Product Design!! To be able to study subjects that truly interest you must be a joy, and I “pecked Emily’s head” for the journey home, explaining how important it is to find a job/vocation that enables you to wake up every morning and not consider chopping your right arm off as an excuse for not getting in to the office.

She didn’t get it, as of course she is fifteen, immortal, and a million years away from all this adult nonsense. All she has to do now to get into sixth form is deliver her predicted grades. She seems quite relaxed about the whole thing, and I wish I could be too, but I seem to be living in a perpetual panic attack at the endless milestones hurtling towards us at a million miles an hour –

GCSEs
Getting into College
Will they go to Uni? If so how will we afford it?
Learning to drive – fills me with fear and dread.
Relationships, and heavens forbid weddings!

I keep telling myself that there is no destination here, and the trick is to enjoy the journey, as the discovery of those photos in the garage demonstrated, if you keep waiting to arrive, you miss all the scenery along the way. Nice words, but putting them into play is not my strength.

Rebecca is getting ready for her school trip next week. Again, “in my day” would apply here, as she is off to Nuremberg on an exchange trip, rather than the local museum to see some bloke in a low quality costume talk about the life of a blacksmith. She has been exchanging emails with her pen pal (although no pen has been involved) for a few weeks, so I hope they can stand each other in the flesh for ten days of the trip.

Getting ready for the trip translates to having clothes bought for her at the Trafford Centre yesterday. I of course had other tasks at hand so Louise did the honours. I am sure I got the better deal.

One trifle, two week's calories So after a hectic Saturday, today has been a little more relaxed. Some ironing aside for Louise, we’ve been what is called pottering, and Rebecca is making a trifle for tea. Having seen the ingredients in her own special recipe, I’m either going to lose some teeth, or about five years of my life expectancy after eating it. I’ve just booked our tickets for the Harry Potter film tonight, and my main concern is when to eat the trifle. The last thing I want to do is take the edge off my sweet tooth before the film. It looks like a long one, and may involve a double-header of Pick n Mix and Popcorn. I’d hate to run short of eats at a crucial time in the plot, and become distracted. No doubt I’ll spend the first half hour of the film marvelling at how grown up the three principal actors look. I don’t have any photos of them in the garage, but the same time machine has been at play it seems. How this can happen when I am not aging at all is, as Toyah once said, a mystery. Not that I am old enough to know who Toyah is of course. Looking ahead to next week, Louise meets with Occupational Health to assist her in her return to work, and I have a meeting in Harrow on Tuesday. My how I am looking forward to those eight hours in the car, probably about as much as Louise is looking forward to going back to work. Her knowledge of day time TV is very impressive, and her obsession with Coach Trip is quite frankly a bit worrying. By the way, on the theme of time flying by, as it turns out this post has all been about, I am wishing this blog a slightly overdue Happy 1st Birthday. It was the 5th of November last year that this thing sprang into life, with just me Louise and two others reading it. I am astounded that I have kept up the postings and that now hundreds of folk each day come here to see what nonsense I am rambling on about. I know, I find that hard to believe too. Who would have thought it? Close your eyes and make a wish, and it can't be that there isn't a 2nd birthday! So I will count Rebecca’s trifle as a birthday treat for my bloggage, and therefore I’ll be able to justify the few thousand calories with my name on them at the local Cineworld. I’ll be coming down off of my sugar rush just in time for work tomorrow, and who knows, removing an arm may be more appealing than the M60. Till the next time…. Share this: X Facebook Print Email Reddit Pinterest Like Loading...

Joey Tempest in bed…in my garage?????

02/10/2010 by mkingdon, posted in Garage Conversion

OK, before we do anything else I just have to cover one thing here.

As part of the admin features of this here blog, there is a tool that tells you what phrases people have typed into search engines to come to it. Usually of course, there are lots of variations of mkingdon, but just now, a phrase appeared that made my blood run cold.

Someone typed “Joey Tempest in bed”. Forget the fact that my one random mention of the Nordic rocker meant that they ended up here, but for the love of God, what type of sick individual wants to see the results from that search term. The internet is a weird place.

Anyway, moving on.

Louise’s recovery continues, and she is getting more mobile each day, but she discovered this week that there are problems with her wound, and she may have a hematoma in there somewhere, oh and her wound is infected!! We are of course delighted with this, and she is having to go to the clinic every other day for check ups and new dressings. She has a cold too!!!! Nothing is ever simple it seems. Speaking of which…..

The more attentive amongst you will have picked up on the fact, that amongst all the pre holiday hullaballoo, we put our house up for sale. Our main reasons for wanting to move where twofold –

We want/need more bedroom space
With my new job, I can no longer drop the girls off at Grandma’s for breakfast, from where they can walk to school.

We live about ten minutes drive from school, but it is no longer “on the way” for either myself and never has been for Louise, so the girls are now faced with walking or catching the bus.

They have always insisted they were fine to do that, but our trust in them to get themselves up, dressed and on their way in time was about zero. If we are not rounding them up, shouting at them, and bundling them into a car, then they would still be sat applying make up at around 10.30am.

Anyway, since returning to school, they have done OK on the whole walking thing, and haven’t yet been late. Of course, they have had Louise around, post op, who can still administer the relevant motivation when required, but still the signs are good.

Add to that, the fact that we’ve had less interest in our house than the East 17 reunion, and our thoughts have been forming in another direction.

Kevin McCloud — Every McCloud has a silver lining.

As it looks like we don’t need to move the girls within five feet of school, we are hatching a plan to create another bedroom. Don’t for one second paint pictures in your mind of our house sat in rolling hills of endless space, and us casually bolting on a new wing. The only place we have not yet made into a room is the garage.

So, over the coming weeks, and no doubt months I shall be sharing the Grand Design style experiences and heartaches involved in a fairly major building project. Like most things until you start to look into it, you have no idea how complex and involved they are, and this certainly applies here.

The idea is less than a week old and here is what I have found out already.

1. Our lease prohibits the garage from being used as anything else but a garage, so we need to get permission. To even ask this question involves a fee of £80, and then if they agree in principle there will be “other fees” to process the permission.

2. We need to move both our gas and electric meter things. Putting the astronomical costs aside for a second, trying to find out who to talk to in order to arrange this is a challenge they should put in place when recruiting new folk for Men in Black. When you do, they then add considerable insult to injury by telling you their prices. To move the electric board and meter, ooh, around a foot and a half to the left, they want £1400 and for the gas meter to go onto an outside wall is another £800. I asked both parties how many men they were sending, and how many days they were staying for. They didn’t understand the question until I pointed out that for those prices I was expecting the A Team to arrive by helicopter, and stay for at least a week! No, it seems both jobs will take less than half a day.

It will also be at least eight weeks until they can get around to it too!!

3. The bank seems willing to lend me endless supplies of cash, but despite banking there since 1987, I still have to spend forty-five minutes on the phone telling them all the information that they have on their computer, like, how much I get paid, how much we spend each month, and by how much one exceeds the other!!

So the pain has started. However the end game still looks worth it, as we should end up with a decent sized fourth bedroom with an en suite. Face it no-one wants to see me dashing through the house to the upstairs bathroom in my undercrackers do they! Well, maybe the guy who searched for Joey Tempest in bed does?

All in all though, this to me still seems like the preferable option to moving. Despite the cost of such a development, it gets us into a four bedroom house, in an area we love, without the pain of putting everything we own into boxes, and then taking it all out again. When you weigh up the legal fees, stamp duty, removal costs etc, the conversion of the garage feels like a bargain!

Tomorrow we have our builder coming round to do some final checks, before he presents us with the official quote. Depending on what that says, this could be the shortest development project in history. However, if he is anywhere near our budget, we’ll crack on I’m sure.

Work has been hectic again this week, and the “highlight” was a training course on Wednesday in central Manchester at the offices of our PR agency. A few of us were to be media trained! I know, I know.

This basically involved learning how to do interviews with the press and how journalists try to trick you into getting info you didn’t want to tell them. Then to my horror, a session on how to do pieces to camera, as we intend to populate our YouTube channel with lots of promo videos, explaining how great we are. The horror of seeing yourself played back in 1080p cannot be fully understood until it happens. Suffice to say, I don’t see a future in television for myself at this stage. Plus, why didn’t anyone tell me I was losing my hair?????

They also say that the camera adds ten pounds. I don’t know about that, I think it is more likely to be the 8,000 calories a day whilst on holiday!!

In other news, Rebecca came home with a letter this week about a school trip. As you know, these days these are usually things like giraffe racing in New Zealand rather than a day in Cleckheaton. This trip is an exchange thing to Germany, where she will go and stay with a “pen pal” and their family in November, and we shall return the favour next April. It’s a good job we plan to have an extra bedroom by then!!

This may not seem odd to you, until you understand that not one pupil in Rebecca’s year actually learns German at school. They all either do Spanish (like Rebecca) or French. The benefits, of course, are around life experience, meeting new people etc, and learning to be independent, but you would think they could manage something like that in a country who speak the language they are learning?? I did study German for three years, and as a result, can now ask for a piece of Black Forest Gateaux with great confidence. This is ALL I can do, but still, a glowing reference for a comprehensive education.

Ich mochte ein stuch schwarzwalderkirschtorte bitte. Have that!

Till the next time….

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