Regular readers will know that input to this blog has been sporadic due to a house move. The downsizing from our 4 bed farm house with 2 51ft long barns to a small 3 bed bungalow has taken about 9 exhausting months but it has finally happened. the move itself was a disaster, thanks to my ill advised decision to use AnyVan instead of a professional and organised house moving company. I wouldn't normally name and shame any company but what they did was entirely unacceptable, more on that shortly. I won't have time for any of my normal project type stuff on cars or bikes but I will do a bit on converting the double garage in to a workshop. It's piled high with stuff at the moment, I couldn't move in there initially but it's slowly getting there already, I boarded the rafters so I could get some stuff out the way quickly. I need to put a consumer unit in there and then wire in circuits for my tools and lighting - it had just one single energy saving bulb in there that was about as bright as David Lammy.
I am ripping out the incredibly expensive electric night storage heaters in favour of an oil fired central heating system, the village we have moved to doesn't have gas and propane would have been far too expensive to install. I didn't much fancy having a half a kilo ton bomb buried in the front garden either. Said bomb has to be checked and serviced once a year, which is quite expensive and it needs filling a lot more often than the equivalent oil fired system.Oil fired boilers are much more expensive but we had one in the old house and in 14 years it never let us down or cost a penny to fix. I am too old to do it myself, a local plumber is taking the job on, I will cover it though as I think it may be of interest so others thinking of doing the same thing. Just as a teaser the maths is that electricity is currently (excellent pun there) 31p per KWh so a 2 kw heater running constantly costs you 60p. To heat a house of this size in the winter you need about 10KW or £3.10 per hour. That's over 20 quid per day. Now ok it won't be running at 100 per cent but even at 50 per cent that's still well over a tenner a day or 300 quid per month. Now you can get economy 7 tariffs still but even that costs about 17p, The equivalent cost for oil is 4.9p as 1 litre gives you 10.25 KW. It's a no brainer, the oil system can be turned on whenever you want it, if you need extra heat during the day you just over ride it, it's still 4.9 p per hour rather than the 31p for electricity. Bugger that and the horse it rode in on.
Anyway, back to the move and what went wrong. We have a lot of stuff - we spent 9 months getting rid of stuff be we still have a life time of schmutter that we have gathered over the years - stuff that means stuff to us, we like it. We had a few quotes, one was ridiculously low, one was ridiculously high and 3 were goldilocks quotes - just right. One, stood out, the 1330 quid that AnyVan quoted. We spoke several times and confirmed that the move would require 2 vans, I assumed it would be 2 blokes per van. They calculated the load and suggested it would be 1 1/2 vans ish, I asked if they were 7.5 tonne, the lady said they would be. Imagine my surprise then, when on the morning of the move 1 3.5 ton van with 2 guys turned up to do our move. There was no way on God's green earth that was ever going to be enough. I went absolutely fucking mental - the stress and anxiety that this move had already caused hd required a trip to the Doctor already, now here we were with just 4 hours to get all our stuff out so the new poeople could move in with just one van 1/4of the size we needed and two guys - who I have to say were absolutely fantastic and did a sterling job and a 14 hour day.
I phoned anyvan to ask what they were going to do, nothing was the answer. The bloke phoned me back half an hour later to say they wouldn't charge me for any waiting time if we had to wait for the key. Well obviously that was as much use as a chocolate tepot. Fortunately Vaughan Dent at Boston van hire came to the rescue with an extra van with tail lift that enabled us to double up. We still had to do two runs as both vans were only 3.5 ton and it was absolutely exhausting but we sort of got the job done. I say sort of as we ended up just dumping a shed load of the stuff in the garage so the two guys could get home to their families. I gave them an extra day's wages, they were worth every penny. I have told Anyvan I want half my money back to cover the rental of the additional van ad the extra money I gave the guys but so far all I have had is platitudes. I will update this if they come back with anything but I am not holding my breath, they have my money and it seems like they couldn't care less. Seriously folks the stress ofmoving house is bad enough but when somethinglike this happens it goes to a whole new level - go on reputation, don't try and save money, it isn't worth it.
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