It’s been a very slow six months in terms of home improvements but it feels as though time has flown by in all other aspects of our lives. Halloween and Christmas have come and gone and we’re scrabbling around in this New Year trying to organise various people to come and have a look at our house.

We seem to be having particular trouble with carpenters at the moment, none of them are all that interested in the little jobs but we don’t feel comfortable hiring anyone for the big jobs without having seen how they are first; both Paul and I are a little reluctant to pay out lots of money after having our fingers burned by Dave Owens and his company last year.

Although we technically won our claim against his company and have a CCJ against them, there’s nothing we can do to make them pay. He’s already had several companies with similar names, all trading under the same initials and logo and using all the same staff. It’s just money that we have to write off as a loss because hiring bailiffs is only going to add to the cost and I’m fairly certain, having heard many similar stories, that a conman like Dave has covered his back.

As an early Christmas present, my extremely generous parents bought us a log-burner for the house which we had fitted in the first week of December. We didn’t have a great deal of room in which to fit the stove, limiting our choices (which was helpful because it took us a long time to decide as it was).  Our two favourite contenders were: The short penguin and Dartmoor 5 .

We finally decided on Dean Forge’s Dartmoor 5, a local company’s smallest stove, and we had them install a slate hearth and an oak mantle whilst they were there, which we’re both really pleased with.

In the first week we had it installed, I took an embarrassing number of pictures of it and then had to delete a few when I came to the conclusion that I had more photos of our stove than our cat. It made for a great addition before Christmas though and really boosted our house’s hygge value.  We do go through the kindling awfully quickly though.

A couple of weeks ago we bought a (very expensive) fan to sit on top our our log burner, I’m going to be honest;  had I known how much it was when Paul bought it, I probably would have put my foot down.  I’ve still not quite recovered from the shock but I do have to admit that it does a very good job of circulating all of the hot air around the room (bloody good for that price!).

Our next addition to the house will be more new windows and a new front door.  These have been in the works since October but our window guy is a very busy man and we also had trouble agreeing on the front door (don’t worry, I mostly got my own way but Paul is still a bit sore on the subject and has taken the ‘do whatever you want’ huffy attitude). We’ve (I’ve) gone for a green door after much deliberating.

I’m excited for the door to be put in as ours has a bad habit of just slowly opening by itself until we come to investigate why there is such a draught in the house. We’ve also gone for a composite door as we also argued about whether to go for wood or UPVC (who’d have thought we’d both have such strong opinions on doors?) and decided that composite was the best of both. We agreed on the glass design because we both didn’t really like any of the options.

The windows being fitted in the living room are the most important as they let in the most sound/draught, and there were obviously some issues before we moved in because there is some sort of fungal growth under the rotting window sills that we’re eager to get rid of.

Today we have manged to book in for some more jobs and quotes with a firm we’ve been using for a lot of small jobs.  We’ve had to tell them we won’t pay their invoice unless they book us in for the next job because it takes such a long time for them to get in touch with us/ sometimes they don’t get in touch at all and we have to chase them. This is a common problem, and not just for this particular firm, from what we’ve experienced and we just cant understand how/why they haven’t  got anyone to manage this side of things more closely. They are even slow to send us invoices!

The first of these jobs will be on Thursday when our garden fence will be replace and then in three weeks time we’ll be having yet more work done.

One of the jobs we’ll be having done in March is a small bathroom makeover. I’ll probably do a whole post on this because we’re going to be doing it up cheaply just until we have the extension, because the extension will be taking a lot longer than originally planned and we both feel like we can’t keep living with a bathroom that depressing.