Back to basics with pavlovs_dog: the £6k sprint

Alchemilla

Sounds very exciting.

kansaskitty

Love your mid-January progress report, very positive and motivating!

Calfuray

pavlovs_dog wrote: »

well my circadian rhythms are all over the shop again Not looking forward to trying to get up tomorrow!

bought some fab prints for a 'gallery' style display going up the stairs to our attic bedroom (reproduction prints of vintage tourism posters). They'll come out of our leftover Chrimble money from our generous relatives. Will need a trip to ikea for frames at some point.

having beavered away on mybuilder and google I now have a list of half a dozen tradespeople who've had good reviews. I've drafted an email outlining what we want done to send off during the week. Need to wait for daylight to poke my head out the skylight and double check my facts about my chimney stacks before I send it.

You haven't been watching VSauce by any chance?

Secret_Saving_Squirrel

Hello,

You are both doing brilliantly and I am sure oh is very proud of his new found skills. When I lived alone I found that I could do most DIY, although not very skillfully as I am not a natural. But it does give a real sense of pride.

Well done!

pavlovs_dog

morning all,

hope you've survived another week at the grindstone. Going to be a low key weekend here as we're both tired. Need to do a small food shop, and will probably pop to ikea to get some frames for our new prints which have arrived.

then I need to clean, organise and recharge, not necessarily in that order. Looking forward to catching up with everyone later and hatching plans for the week to come

Alchemilla

Happy recharging. The days are getting longer...

pavlovs_dog

A!di and ike@ both packed today. Ike@ was particularly stressful. Apparently it was 'let your children run riot, unsupervised' day :cool:

£21 spend on grocery, the bulk of which was on F&V. All meals for next week planned around the stores again. I've been really enjoying the meal planning and using things up, and still have plenty in to keep spends low for another few weeks. Which is funny really, because there was a time when I would have seen nothing to eat, and gone to do a big shop

Came home from shops and had a nice few hours pottering in the kitchen. Made a root veg tagine for tomorrow, defrosted chicken stew for tonight, stripped the chook that I slow cooked earlier in the week and put carcass into SC to make stock for the cous cous which we'll eat with the tagine.

As there was less chicken stew than I anticipated, I thought I'd bulk it out with a bit of chopped cabbage and some yorkshires puds from the freezer. There were a handful of leftover apples and pears in the fruit bowl from last week which I stewed to make a crumble for pud (using a pack of crumble mix from an old approved food order). Went to put the oven on and... nothing. It's dead :eek: hob is working fine so we think it's something electrical that needs fixing. Will ask my stepdad to come and play with it tomorrow afternoon (once I've had time to clean it ). So there were no yorkshires for tea. I'm now trying to use the convection feature on the microwave for the first time to cook the crumble.

Fortunately the bulk of meals planned for the week can be done using just the hob, SC or micro. Plan is

*veggie tagine with cous cous (rolled over from last week due to a swap around)
* chilli & rice
* Chicken stir fry
* pasta and sauce
* roast dinner from sausages

museumworker

Aargh, hope the oven is easily (and cheaply!) fixed!

Is IKEA not like that every weekend?? We would go after work to avoid the queues (and have a hot dog supper, DD loved those!)

Alchemilla

Are there any fuses you can get at?

pavlovs_dog

Calfuray wrote: »

You haven't been watching VSauce by any chance?

never heard of it?

Alchemilla wrote: »

Are there any fuses you can get at?

won't know until we pull it out later. It's huge, dreading moving it to be honest for fear of damaging floor tiles.

From a short term point of view, I hope it is fixable, as a £600+ spend to replace the cooker wasn't part of 2014's agenda. That said, the cooker was installed by the builder who did the house up. I would never have chosen it myself (massive single oven range cooker = expensive to run compared to range cooker with 2 smaller ovens). If I had to replace it, we would stand to save money on energy bills after the initial outlay.