Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Mar 8, 2007
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days that all these memories come flooding back to me.
The Cooker
Our electric cooker blew up recently; in fact it was only five days from Christmas when it happened. Mk2 turned on the oven and bang! This was followed by a blue flash and lots of smoke. I was on this computer at the time when she came running through to tell me. I think she thought that I could fix it, but the only thing I could do was to cut off the power going to it, then disconnect it from the wall socket once I had removed the fuse from the main fuse box. Mind you, it had lasted for a few years. In fact we bought it eight years ago, so it had served us well. All the same, I would have preferred it if it had blown up at any other time of the year and not just before Christmas.
So off we went the following morning, into the crowded shopping precinct full of Christmas shoppers, in search of a replacement one. We looked in a couple of the major electrical stores and did, indeed, find one that we liked, but when we asked the salesman when it could be delivered, he took a sharp intake of breath and told us it would be well into the New Year!
'So what do we do for our Christmas dinner?' we asked. He just shrugged his shoulders in reply.
'OK then, we will take it with us now,' I said but apparently this could not be done as they did not have one in stock. So when I asked if we could take the display one, he just laughed and told us that they needed that one in the store.
'Is that so you can tell folk that you haven't got that model in the shop then?' I asked. At this point his interest seemed to drift elsewhere, then he shrugged his shoulders again and left us standing there and walked away. You can't help but get the impression that they don't want to sell the stock they have in their shops. Ah! The joys of shopping these days, dealing with friendly and helpful staff seems to be a thing of the past.
So we left the big electrical stores and headed off to the CO-OP where, by pure chance, they were having a closing down sale. Now don't think I was pleased about this closing down, as the more competition these other stores have the better as far as I am concerned. Anyway, we found a gas cooker at a very reasonable marked-down price, so knowing that our kitchen was plumbed for gas, we bought it. Not only did we buy it there and then but they also got a big strong lad to wheel it out and put it into our car for us, so we left and made for home feeling rather pleased with ourselves. What happens next is unbelievable, apart from the fact that it did, to us. You see when we first bought this house the previous owner was not what you would call a great do-it-yourself kind of person. In fact, when he ripped out his gas cooker ready to move out, he simply bent over the gas supply pipe then squeezed it tight with a pair of pliers. Of course, as soon as we moved in we had ripped out the whole kitchen right down to the bare walls as it was so bad, so that we could fit a new one ourselves. While we were doing this we could smell gas and started to look around for a leak. Now there was not much left of the old kitchen - in fact the tapes were supported by long pieces of string hung from the ceiling. We found the pipe and saw what he had done, so we called the emergency gas people who could not believe what they saw and repaired it by capping it off.
Now that is what caused my next problem. You see, after I had fitted the new kitchen, I never noticed that the gas people had capped the supply pipe about two feet away from the cooker point. This now meant, of course, that we could not even see the connection point let alone hook up our new cooker to it. The part we needed was hidden behind the fitted corner unit that I had installed back then, so the only way I could get to it was to rip the back off the unit after I had emptied all its contents - and believe me there was a lot if that to move! It took us ages just to empty it and then I had to try and remove the back without causing too much damage to the unit. This was the most difficult part as the back is slid into grooves, down into place from the top, before the bunker top is fitted. After I had got that out eventually, the plumber could then get access to solder an extension that would take the pipe into position for hook-up. I had to shore up the middle shelf which could not be removed either, as it also had been fitted prior to the bunker top. I did this by cutting three poles high enough to pin the shelf to the underside of the top. While the plumber was soldering the join I went into my shed and made a new back from some material I had lying around. I made it slightly smaller all the way round so it would be a lot easier to fit than it was to take out. When I came back in with the new back board the plumber was clearing up as he had finished. I fitted the new back without any problem, in fact that was the easiest part of the job to date.
Our kitchen looked like a bomb had gone off in it, as did the rest of the house as we had all the contents of that corner cupboard strewn all over the place. At least we could now boil the water for our cup of tea on our new gas cooker, which I must admit cheered us both up no end, as by now we were both really tired and sick of all the upheaval. After our cuppa we both got stuck in and started packing everything back into the cupboard and scrubbing up all the mess, which there was quite a lot of as you can imagine. Still it's all completed now and Mk2 is really pleased with the end result. One thing, though, I feel I must mention. If you ever decide to change your cooker from electric to gas, make sure the gas connection is right behind the cooker itself, or you may have to experience what we did, and that is not highly recommended!
