Monthly archives: January 2007

I’ve just put a bunch of pictures up on the photos section of this site – the most recent thumbnails should be on the left and you can click on them to be taken to the gallery. The pictures currently fall into three categories – family, house and snaps – so you will see some pics of the house as it develops, some more pics of Sophie as she gets bigger and just some other photos that I like.

It’s taken a while to get used to the new camera – just as it did with the old Nikon 5700 – but it’s fun learning about it. It’s a Nikon D50 that I bought for a song (£130 including a kit lens) on ebay a couple of months ago.

We had a visit from Patricia and George yesterday. It was good to see them and to get another perspective on the house. Sophie as usual took about two hours to settle down and stop bouncing off the walls with excitement at having visitors. I kept having to pick her up and put her in the next room to cool down. She loved her present of finger paints and a paint book too, which she played with alongside me while I edited my photos last night.

The house is still the same – we are struggling to get a builder to even provide a quotation never mind agree to do the work so we may need to look further afield. We haven’t agreed on a kitchen style yet, never mind a supplier so no progress there. The living room and first floor bedrooms can be done quickly if we pull the finger out so we may try to make progress with that this week. Bedroom 1 needs to have a fairly horrible gas fire extracted from a nice marble surround. The living room needs to have a totally new fireplace to replace the over large wood burning stove.

We have been in the new house in Harrogate for just over two weeks now and we are pretty comfortable although it is a bit of an old persons house at the moment. No curtains at the front, just the previous owner’s net curtains which I can’t wait to bin. NO DISHWASHER because the small kitchen will be redeveloped soon. VERY LITTLE TELLY as the previous ownwer didn’t have one and the aerial is a little antiquated for DVB-T/FREEVIEW. NO BROADBAND so it doesn’t really feel like a home yet – according to our soon to be new ISP Eclipse anyway who reported the following survey results recently:

32% of people could not live without their curtains and only 8.5% could not live without their microwave. This compares to a staggering 92% of people who said that in the first month following moving into a new home, the one thing they wouldn’t be able to live without was their broadband connection.

The house and location are great though, 10 minutes to walk downtown, 5 minutes walk to Sophie’s school, 5 minutes drive to my office and a less pleasing 50 mins to Jean’s new office in Wakefield. The house consists of 4 large bedrooms, two on each floor, two large bathrooms, a large walk in wardrobe on the first floor. The ground floor isn’t huge – but we will join the kitchen and dining room together to create a large family room. Having the cellar though is great, we’ve got the laundry down there, an overflow fridge freezer and a larder room for storing veggies and drink. Means we don’t need to pack out the kitchen with storage.

Some oddities though. My car insurance has been hiked by £50 for moving to Harrogate from Hull. English average for car theft is 4.5 per 1000. Hull is 10 and Harrogate 2 per 1000. How does that make sense? I suspect an affordability issue. That or the fact that the theft of one Range Rover or Aston Martin from the neighbour blows more insurance company profit than 20 Citroen Saxos nicked in Hull?

Also wonderful Lib Dem Harrogate has possibly the worst recycling service anywhere. Rubbish is piled in big black binliners at the side of the house – the bin men hand you two new bags when they pick up. They don’t recyle plastics either. Jean called the council and asked why they can have a top-class service in Hull and a third world one here are the response was
“well the government likes to invest in services like that for deprived areas”. What about the £1,350 we’re investing in Harrogate council fees on an annual basis then!

Anyway, I’ll post some pictures of the house and get a before and after series going AS SOON AS I GET BROADBAND!

Adam