Oh I am in a right mood just now. This is my first post for ages and it's the first post of the new year. I had good intentions of starting to post earlier (didn't happen) and I had good intentions of being possitive. But boy am I a little bit hacked off at the moment!

It all started at the end of last year, won't bore you with all the details but we "needed" a new gas fire and on the back of that what we really needed was a new central heating system (due to crap one that came with the house). So after getting an outragiously expensive quote from British Gas (not only was it vastly over priced but the quote contained 13 radiators (he couldn't count should have been 14) all of the same size and spec... err... nope a 4 foot radiator would look silly sticking out of the downstairs loo!!

We got a quote of a local plumber, who'd done work at our last house. His quote was quite a bit less than BG, and when negotiating my OH got the plumber to throw in the fire fitting as a kind of "loss leader". So we're winning always round.

To cut a story short. They fitted the new central heating before Xmas - hurray a warm house for the festive period! But didn't fit the fire (didn't have time...) so we agreed a date after Xmas - today as it happens. Now I bought the fire almost a month ago, so it's been sitting in a box in our lounge for the best part of 4 weeks. The central heating's fine (except that the radio controlled thermostat doesn't work). This has taken Mr plumber three weeks (well he doesn't want to work around Xmas does he?) to fix. But actually it's not fixed because the replacement doesn;t work. So we've now got an old fashioned (but working) timer on the boiler and no thermostat. Still he's got another style that he'll bring... next week. So we've got a hole on the wall in the hall where the 'stat should be - but isn't.

But the thing that's really got me is, they turn up today and left at 12:30 saying we've done all we can do today, we'll be back next week. And I look at what they've done, and they've part fitted my new fire (no faciour, no gas, nothing other than the new fire in the hole). They can't finish it today because... nope didn't catch the reason (I think it was something like - can't be arsed, or similar). But better than that, they just left everything in situ. So now they've gone I've got to workout which bits of metal/screws/god-knows-what that they've left strewn about the place is actually part of the (finished) fire. And I've got to work out how to stop my little boy bending/pulling any other wires sticking out of the new hole in the wall.

Oh I am just a bit hacked off really...