Hello there!
Greetings from our bedroom! CBC and I are currently hiding in our bedroom as it is so cold and our boiler is broken! What unfortunate timing as we have had snow this weekend and I have been in all weekend!
It is ironic that we have moved into our new house which is only 3 years old with a 3 year old Vaillant boiler and have been here 3 months. And in that time, our boiler has broken TWICE! This time it broke last Wednesday but the Vaillant engineer cannot come till Tuesday. I thought Vaillant were supposed to be the best? I can honestly say that this is not my experience at all! We lived in the Bungalow for two years with a Vaillant boiler and it developed about 15 faults in that time. Most of these times we managed to fix these by bleeding the radiators, allowing more water to go in, trying to raise the pressure but on THREE occasions, the engineer was called out. I have really started to develop this silly conspiracy-theory in my head where the engineer DOES something each time to ensure that it will develop a fault in a certain amount of time and then it will go wrong!
Having got used to central heating over the past 4.5 years of being married, I sometimes struggle to imagine how I survived living in a house with no central heating for some 30 years! I DO remember the cold. I remember in my twenties when Mum had got married and moved out, sometimes, I would sit myself on one of the uncomfortable fold-up chairs from the kitchen so I could sit right up in front of our fake-fire fan heater wearing a myriad layers. In fact, I remembered a blog post in which I shared what I would put on when I get home to combat the cold and have just spent 10 minutes searching for it- here is The Blogger who came in from the Cold!
I have been adopting that very same technique today and yesterday to try and combat the cold. I thought I'd take a picture and show me dressed up in all the layers! I am wearing thick trousers, handmade thick wool socks, sheepskin slippers, a long-sleeved top, a reasonably thick, jumper, a vintage alpaca wool over-sized jumper, a vintage sheepskin gilet, a sheepskin lined hood, a fluffy scarf, a cashmere shawl and two odd fingerless gloves! Sorry, I could have moved the unsightly boxes and random carrierbag from the background but I didn't!
CBC and I have both turned the oven on a few times and stood in front of it with our hands in whilst in the kitchen. Aside from the oven and layers, the other two things which have been our saviour are the tiny little portable fanheater that was my Mum's that I used to put on when I was going to bed back in my family home. We've had it on here in the bedroom. The thing that makes me most happy about this was, when we moved here, CBC was all rude and bitchy about this little heater and told me we didn't need that dusty old rubbish any more with our new modern house with underfloor heating, EPC rating B+ and the suchlike. I told him that we WERE bringing it with us and our heating might break at some point and then he'd be grateful for it. He was, of course, very sceptical, but I now hope that it has proved its mettle in remaining in our house as a back-up. I keep it by my side of the bed and like to use it anyway when it is cold when we go to bed.
The other saviour comes in the form of a gift from WOMOTM, my Father-in-Law. He was already the saviour when I lived in my childhood home as he bought me an electric blanket. But Christmas 2016, he bought us an electric duvet for our present which saved us in the poorly-insulated bungalow. Last night, I went to fetch it from the spare room and it kept us cosy all night. Even beyond the grave he is still protecting us! On that note,I was so happy on Tuesday night because he was alive in my dream. It was so vivid, he was well and I was able to chat to him. When I woke up, I realised, of course, that it was a dream, but it was so lovely to see him.
What do you do to combat the cold?
xx