I'm with you there, Brother Golfy

Having just read Golfy's blog of woe regarding his contact lenses, of which Major Major would be proud, I felt compelled to share my story.

My story revolves around a door, a front door to be precise.  We are planning, as part of our extension and remodelling project, to replace our double-glazed door with an "original" Victorian four-panel door with stained glass panels, as befitting a house made in 1900.  

Now I can tell you with some vigour that the planning of this door has been both long and complicated.  Should we go reclaimed or new?  LO's uncle is a carpenter and his advice was "go for new".  Well we put that one to bed pretty quickly, as all the new doors we found just looked new, so we were scouring the internet for local reclaim yards, visiting said yards and inspecting their stock.  

It is at this point that we experienced once again the fight or our naivety versus the world.  We imagined we were probably the only people in the country looking for a four-panel Victorian doors.  Perhaps getting over 100,000 hits from Google might have alerted us to the reality, however it did take a visit to several reclaim yards to realise that there might just be one or two others out there looking for the same, because there was not much "stock on the market".

We then found a place 40 minutes away that did have doors by the dozen, however he was a purveyor of quality period door, and had a price to match.  Premium product for premium notes.  As Arthur Daley often said "How much?".

Then we found a localish place that made new doors, but with stained glass done the "old fashioned way" with proper leading, and with glass made full or wrinkles and bubbles as old glass was, and it just looks the business, on the internet anyway.  So one lunchtime I take a trip down, and am blown away by them, they are just what we want; we can get new wood, well made, no filler, but with glass that looks of its time, and let's be honest, once you have painted a door, it is just a bit of painted wood, so we think it is the best of all worlds.  They also provide the surround, with window above, in one package.  We can have our house number made out in the top window in leaded glass also, so we are absolutely "made up".  A quick call to LO and a discussion about which glass pattern we want with the assistance of phone and the internet each end (...second one down on first page, number 121, yes, that's the one...) and an order is placed.  

He then asks if we have lined up a carpenter, and I say no.  He says he "has a man" that does his fitting, and can come and measure the hole, ensure the door is basically trimmed to fit in the workshop, and he can then turn up to remove the old and fit the new in one seamless activity.  That is definitely a result for us, since the coordination of door man and fitter man was a concern, but we are now being offered a one stop shop that will guarantee it all gets done, and done right.

At long last, I am getting to the point of the story.  The carpenter.  We arrange a visit Tuesday evening, and are promised a call early in the day to fine tune the arrival time.  No call, no visit.  This is repeated, and I am feeling rather embarrassed to say this out loud, no fewer than five time before he does finally turn up.  I open the door to a guy who manages to combine sheepishness, slight apology and utter weariness in a single look, but he is actually good and a nice bloke and we kind of manage to move on.  So the door hole is measured, various bits of the old door removed so we can see what surface is behind, to which we will be fixing the door, and overall I am happier now that we are on the way.  

Final comment from LO "He won't be cheap, he is a posh carpenter".  Now there is pith of which Scobi can only dream.*

Now all we need to do is get the door finished, delivered and fitted, and that may end up being a source of another story.  I wonder whether bloggers go looking for nonsense and trouble just to inspire them to write.  Probably not, but it is a theory I will investigate further, since it may well be NLP in action.

Have a great weekend, speak next week.

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* You may have noticed some silliness around not splitting infinitives, which is what I think that is called.  i.e. in the words of Star Trek, "to boldly go" is technically wrong.  It should be "To go boldly", but of course the former is more punchy, so it stayed.  This is a regular topic on the Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode film review show, which is mostly why I am mentioning it.  Mark is a pedant about such things, and gets the micky right royally taken as a result.  As Winston Churchill is said to have uttered "Not ending a sentence with a preposition is a bit of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put".  Now, I had to Google that to get it right, and should comment that there are a dozen or more variations of the quote, however that one gives the flavour, and that is good enough for me.  It is filed in the same drawer as "avoid cliches like the plague".