The Next Project

I like a good project, although I must stress here that I am not using this word as an American might use it, to describe something we would call a 'job'. For me a 'project' is something bigger, more complex, and which involves multiple skills and a mix of different resources. Perhaps a better title for this one might be the 'Last Project' because on this occasion we are going to decorate the only room in the house that we have yet to tackle. It is small, thankfully, indeed it is the smallest room in our house (which means that it is rather difficult to photograph).

We refer to this room as the 'En Suite' since it is only accessible from one of our bedrooms but despite it being a feature of that room it remained untouched when we re-papered and carpeted the room itself.

So here is the 'before' picture, taken just before I turned off the water supply to the house so that I could fit shut-off valves to the pipes that feed some of  the plumbing bits, these being things that were to be replaced. Failure to do this would have resulted in water spraying everywhere so it seemed like a good idea. The plan was to change both the toilet and the sink so without any further delay, they are ripped out.

Why are we doing this, you might ask. In all honesty it comes down to the weather which has been exceptionally wet of late, an unpredictable mixture of sunshine and rain that makes outdoor projects unpleasant. Then there were the tiny beetles we saw flying about which made us think 'woodworm'. And indeed there was some slight evidence beneath the toilet of the tiny holes made by these insects when they transition from worm to flight mode and emerge into daylight. But thankfully nothing too serious.

So having made the decision and having begun the ripping apart, next comes the covering up phase, the ceiling, walls and the floor.

Painting a room, in my view, should start at the top, the ceiling, so this gets a new coat of paint after sanding off some of the uneven lumps and bumps. The room is a confined space so once the toilet and sink have gone things become a little easier and balancing on a set of steps is less fraught with danger. We need to make some decisions about the walls, what will best cover up their unevenness and will breathe new life into the tiny room but I have some leftover flooring from our kitchen project, easily enough to cover this tiny space, so I get down on my knees and start laying the stuff.

Buying big things like a new toilet and a sink/vanity unit has to be done 'sight unseen' as we live many miles away from the nearest store and even if we did fancy a day in Glasgow to look at toilets, many places do not carry much stock in store. So we are forced into online shopping, a process that restricts us to the limited number of suppliers who do not add on ridiculously high delivery charges for large items. When the first large box arrives, a small basin and the cabinet it will sit on, it is carried up to the house by the postman (sorry mate) and we stagger inside with it, anxious to see inside.

We rapidly unpack and are quite pleased with what we have bought unseen although it does require a little modification. It needs chunks cut out of the rear, so that the water and waste pipes can be connected,  these coming up through the floor from beneath the house. Any refurbishment project will almost certainly have problems that need to be solved, things that have to be worked out to make things fit or look nice. And then there is always an ideal sequence of tasks that must be followed to avoid fitting something then having to take it all apart again. I do not pretend to be an expert so I have a mighty feeling of relief when the plumbing is reconnected and the water turned on again with no leaks showing up.

Next comes the walls, probably the most important part of the room visually. Having decided upon wallpaper we order a couple of rolls then we agree that a line of white tiles (again leftover from our kitchen project) would look nice around the base of the walls. Our local hardware shop provides some tile adhesive, in tubes, which must have been on their shelves for ages as it was impossible to squeeze anything out without slicing the top off of the tube. But it did the job and this enables us to tick something else off the job list.

The project then goes on pause whilst we await the next exciting delivery package, a new toilet. Fitting this will be something of a challenge for me - it is a job I have always previously left to the plumbers and avoided doing myself for fear that mistakes can be rather smelly. But then we get a message saying that the toilet was delivered yesterday... except it wasn't. This leads to a frustrating sequence of exchanges through the supplier's 'chat' feature as we try to establish where it has gone and wonder whether it is sitting on someone else's doorstep, perhaps blocking their exit from home. But no, it turns out that the message was wrong and should not have been sent so we sit back and wait. Such complications are simply a factor of the world of instant communication that we live in and the confusion this can lead to when a wrong button is pressed resulting in the wrong message going out. How did we manage before internet based trading became the order of the day and communication with chatbots became an everyday experience.

But all this is forgotten as the wallpaper has finally arrived. We have chosen a 'Beach Hut' look and the paper has some rather nice glittery bits to add a touch of glamour when someone is using the loo. And the nice thing about this paper is that it does not require any pattern matching, the joins just disappear into the randomness of the fake wooden strips.

Sticking this onto the wall takes only a few hours but these are somewhat stressful as inevitably one is working to a timeline when putting up wallpaper. Once the paste is mixed then the clock starts ticking as the adhesive setting process has begun and each second that passes the paste will get thicker. However in this case we think the stress is justified and the transformation of our smallest room is just what we hoped for. One more job is ticked off the project list. Now we just need that toilet to arrive, as if by magic, on our doorstep.

And then it does. Just like that, without any warning and carried up the steps to our house by another muscle-bound delivery driver.  Which just leaves, of course, the small matter of fitting it and connecting it up so water can flow in and out as nature intended. This is a first for me, and perhaps also a last, so I start by reading the instructions thoroughly. These soon lead me to the conclusion that they do not accurately show how all the various bits fit inside the cistern because what we have bought is smaller than the manual assumes it is. So can I change things around and fit them differently and if so, will it still work?

I soon realise that there is a very precise sequence in which everything has to be fitted and connected up as access to the rear of the toilet is limited and the watertight seal between the cistern and the toilet underneath must be perfect as mistakes cannot be rectified later. There is nothing in the instructions that explains this. It is a 'work it out for yourself' thing. I have an additional problem to deal with as the water supply has to be fed from right to left behind the toilet which means bonus bits of pipework, again not something the manual deals with. Somehow or other the job gets done and once again there is an immense sense of satisfaction that comes when there are no leaks... from anywhere. So does it work? The first flush takes place and everything seems to go rather well. Water slushes away (somewhere) and more water gushes in ready for another go. I think we can call that job done.

All that remains is the project video. Enjoy.

Holland by bike - arrival home

Arriving back home from a holiday like the one we have just had; one might think it would be a time for relaxation and reflection. For us, however, it felt odd being back and we found it difficult to slip back into our old routine or even remember what it was. We had become used to a different way of life, one full of uncertainty: Where would we be sleeping the next night? How would our physical limits manage on the next day of riding? What was our route for the next day? Would it be another hot day and was there rain coming? What would happen if we had a puncture, a bike chain snapped or we broke down for some other reason? These questions were what we had accepted as part of our everyday lives and it would take time for the routine and stability of home life to become normal again, much longer than we might have expected.

Before any of that could start, however, we faced a list of chores - unpacking, emptying our panniers completely, washing the dirty clothes we had been carrying around with us, cleaning the accumulated dust and grime from the bikes. Then there were the domestic chores waiting for us. Everything in the garden had grown bigger or had come into flower during our time away. The grass in the garden was waste high, hiding the paths we generally keep clear to walk around on, so some strimming was needed. The water level in our pond was lower than we had ever seen it, an indicator of the long period of dry weather that had prevailed in our absence although the forecast for the days to come showed that this would all soon change.

We needed food, having run down our supplies before we left home, so shopping was a priority. It was only then that we discovered our local Co-op had empty shelves due to the organisation having been hacked, a news story we had missed whilst away. The friends and neighbours we had missed for so long wanted to know where we had been and what we had been doing. This needed a full explanation which took time as they seemed to find it hard to believe what they were hearing. We had returned from doing something they would never consider for themselves and which was something even we never really expect to repeat. Pushing our bodies to such limits over such a long period seems unreal, on reflection.

The hot dry weather we had experienced in Holland continued for a short while after our arrival home, which made us even more aware of how lucky we had been with the weather on our tour. We had gone away prepared for a mix of wet and dry, hot and cold, but instead were given just one day of heavy rain in four weeks of cycling, almost beyond belief. The first week had been cool, more or less what we expected, but then as it became warmer more of our clothes had ended up in the panniers until eventually the heat was such that shorts and T-shirts were all that was needed. We were pleased that our health and our stamina had held out, this being sort of what we had hoped for, although we had always been prepared to return early had we felt that this was necessary. It wasn't.

What we had not expected was the feeling of sadness, regret to have left behind an environment that accepts and respects cyclists. We immediately began to notice the criticism aimed at cyclists in our own country coming from other road users; both car drivers and pedestrians moaning about them for different reasons. Riding two abreast on a road (this is advised so that a car can pass more quickly), riding on the pavement (given the choice between a narrow road full of lorries and an empty pavement I know where I would rather be), such things have always been the subject of criticism but now our eyes had been opened to see things from a different perspective. Outside of a few of our big cities cyclists are generally second class road users, hated by all and expected to do battle with cars on busy roads with no help from the infrastructure itself. Holland is no different in one way. The roads are just as full of cars and can be unsafe for other road users but many years ago the Dutch people made the decision not to let rising car use dominate the way the country worked. They incorporated an alternative network alongside the one for cars and fought for the right to keep riding on bikes. Dutch cyclists do not, in the main, wear helmets for the simple reason that they feel safe when they ride and they do not want anyone to be discouraged from cycling by having to put one on. The low cycling casualty rates back this up so there is no reason to change. One Dutchman we met explained it this way - for all road users the heavier you are the more responsibility you carry towards those lighter than you, with pedestrians at the lightest end of the scale. Cyclists, whose combined weight makes them heavier than most pedestrians, must give way and respect the rights of those walking and cars, being heavier still, must give way to both cyclists and pedestrians whenever there are crossing points and junctions. The whole infrastructure in Holland is designed on the basis of this way of thinking.

I could not resist this. The Monday morning rush hour in Den Haag, to which I have added some music. This is the way of life we are now missing.

We have yet to ride our bikes since we arrived home, partly due to the wet weather but also because we know it will bring home to us again the sense of loss, awareness of the direction our country might have gone that would have made our lives different from what they have been.