While you can buy doors from DIY shops, you need to go to a dedicated door shop if you want something nice. Bridgtown Doors is not a million miles from us, and it's pretty much the go-to location for doors in the surrounding area. An indication of its popularity is the fact that having bought two doors and all the fittings, when the wife asked when they could fit them, the guy behind the counter replied: "January." JANUARY! Are you having a laugh? We can't wait until January. Apparently, they have five fitters, and they were all fully booked until the end of January. He did offer to put us on a cancellation list in the hope someone might change their install date, thus freeing up a fitter, but I didn't hold much hope.

"Sixty-seven quid? I like that price!" The wife looked at me with that look that has taken wives years to perfect: Why did I marry you? No, it wasn't sixty-seven pounds, it was sixty-seven packs! What the hell! I'm not tiling the house, you know. Sixty-seven packs are a lot of tiles. The woman designer made a sweeping gesture with her hand. "They've got to tile up the wall." yeah, but not right to the ceiling, and we've got wall-mounted cupboards. image source Clutching my wallet and staggering backwards, I realised that at £13.42 (the price at the time), it would cost me £899.14 just for the tiles, let alone the grout and the sealer. With moist eyes, I fed my credit card into the machine while the wife dreamed of saucepans and knife blocks.

Bye, bye doorway.How we managed for the last twenty-odd years with our former small kitchen is beyond me. The constant moans of "Can you get out of the kitchen? There's no room!" had been a constant over the years of a Sunday when the roast was being cooked. After much negotiating, the missus had agreed to block the door off. This allowed us to have a work surface that runs the length of the kitchen. Cooking Sunday dinner last weekend was absolute bliss. But wait, we've not got that far yet.

We've lived in our house for around twenty-five years now. Probably about twenty years ago, I offered to give the kitchen a makeover. We didn't have much money, so I figured some new work surfaces and cupboard doors would at least buy me a few years before we took the plunge on what is a very expensive exercise: a new kitchen. Like most men's cunning plans, things didn't quite go as I'd hoped, and in fact, I had to repair the floor and replace a few of the rotten cupboards. Suffice it to say, I spent double what I'd initially budgeted for.

The other day, a friend said, "I'm surprised you're not on Bluesky Pete." If anything, I'm looking to downsize my Social Media presence, not increase it. One of the key features for any self-respecting Geek is the ability to use your Domain Name as your handle. I'm not going to go into details here; to be honest, for the average Joe Public, it's a bit of a faff and probably unnecessary.