Falls of Dess and new oven at last

We had a delightful picnic today beside the Falls of Dess in Kincardine O’Neil. It’s Daniel’s birthday this week and he wanted to go for a walk in the country and specifically chose this waterfall which we visited once before for Ben’s birthday.

It’s a lovely, mostly flat walk beside farmland and through forest with lovely views of the surrounding countryside. Part of the walk follows Dess Burn which has a truly lovely waterfall. This is where we had our picnic. There’s a beautiful spot overlooking the falls on a springy forest floor that’s a bit protected from inclement weather but mostly you just get a nice view of the waterfall with the accompanying waterfall orchestra.

I considered swimming in the falls but we decided to go for coffee at our friend’s house instead. They’ve just got two new Bengal kittens. This is Fingal who looks like a snow leopard.

The good news is we finally got a new range this week so I was able to bake Daniel a cake in our new oven. It has been more than a month since our oven broke. We tried to fix it and the first engineer who came to look charged us £150 to tell us he’d need a gas engineer to come with him on a second visit and for the two of them it would be another £300. Once upon a time tradespeople used to quote for free. Now it seems you have to pay £150 just for the privilege of hearing how much you will owe them.

Now that we have a new oven I’ve realised how annoying our old one was: it didn’t cook evenly, the door was hard to shut, it was small and didn’t fit our baking tray, the drawer at the bottom made a terrible noise when opened. But the new oven wasn’t without drama. Nothing is ever simple.

The first time they tried to install it was a couple of weeks ago and the delivery/installation team told us there was insufficient space above the hob. The instructions require 650mm from the hob to anything flammable above. So they left. Fortunately we’ve got a great joiner who was doing some work at our house already and he fixed the problem which required cutting away part of the surround and removing a plastic cover in the chimney. He had to cut up to the line in the green surround at the top of this next photo.

Above the hob was just a piece of plastic that was blocking the old chimney. It was ugly and very old so I was happy in the end to get rid of it and while we had a huge hole there I took some photos of the old chimney.

Our joiner got some bespoke pieces of stainless steel cut to cover the hole and the exposed brick and concrete. Here is it after it just went in.

Then delivery attempt number 2 for our new range came and I nearly thought it was also going to be a no-go again because it was different guys who said they wouldn’t be able to carry the old range away and the new one in due to the weight of the things and all the stairs we have. Thankfully they phoned their head office in Dundee and there were two other guys nearby on another delivery who were able to do the heavy lifting. I honestly wasn’t expecting it to happen but it did and everything works.

The new range is very smart. It’s a Belling which is also made in the UK but cheaper than a Rangemaster which is what our old one was. I checked out the reviews on Which? beforehand and apparently this brand has fewer issues reported by customers so that’s a good sign although the label on the front with the brand name on it fell off just after it got installed. I stuck it back on. It’s a non-functional part so surely that doesn’t matter?

The kitchen is looking lovely again.

And I’ve made my first loaf of bread in the new oven. It was a success.