Theme for Spring-Cleaning

Spring Cleaning. I have thought of having a theme for specific periods of the year. This is a bit like the schools having a particular theme to aid learning. Education is a very vast field. In order to get the most out of the time available for learning, the schools have been adopting a specific theme for each term. I feel it increases the efficiency of learning by giving a direction, a focus in the wilderness of knowledge there is out there in which a student is expected to navigate. My situation at home is a bit similar with regards to the amount of work that needs to be done. Everywhere I look, there is something that needs doing. It is disorganised and messy. Every room demands attention and work. In this vast sea of jobs that needs to be done, I need to navigate and do the jobs as far as I can and hope the results make a difference to our lives. So, I have decided to adopt the strategy of having a specific theme for specific periods of the year. So the theme for the Spring 2012 is 'cleaning'. Spring cleaning is practiced by many households and I have taken my theme from the same concept. However, my theme would be running through the whole of spring 2012. In this period, I would take up the task of cleaning anything that needs cleaning in the house. My priority would be initially the so called 'eye sores'. Eye sores are the things that draw your attention when you first enter a room by their ugliness. I would be using most of my time in the evenings and weekends to spend on working on this theme. I hope to see a much more liveable home at the end of spring 2012. Then it would be a matter of some maintainance. Windows and window sills. So the cleaning started with the windows and window sills. I sprayed it with dettol first and left it for a few minutes. Then I just used a cleaning rag and wiped everything nice and clean. The window sill and the window in the kitchen was most hard work. Then I went on to clean the doors. It is a lot of rubbing and scrubbing and tires your hands. I did several surfaces but will need to come back to do some more surfaces. But most eyesores have been dealt with for now. The kitchen. The kitchen is very old. It must have been painted white before the last owners sold it to us. We have managed over the years to make it look quite dirty with stains, colours, writing, scratches and so on. It is a major eyesore for the whole house. When you first enter you can't but feel a sinking of your heart as you see the kitchen. So what to do? Have a new kitchen? That would be a minimum of £5000. Some internet searching gave me the idea that we can just replace the doors. I got a quote for £1,250.00 just for all the doors. Still a lot of money. Then we got the idea of just painting the doors. One of our friends had done just that with good results. I looked at some youtube videos on painting the kitchen doors and spray painting seemed like a good idea. Went to Screwfix and bought some suitable spray paints. Initially it looked great. It was easy and fast. But as the paint set it, the result was not all that good. The paint was too thin. Even several coats was not good enough. Then we found the non drip white paint and it was just brilliant. Even though it was painted with a brush, it set nicely and no brush marks could be seen. It was nice and smooth and thick enough to cover all the stains, marks and scratches. The drawer fronts were painted too and any where that needed a touch of paint was painted over. The kitchen looked much much better. Not like new. But your heart didn't sink when you entered it now. After cleaning all the door knobs and fixing them it looked even better. That would do. It cost less than a £75 and very good value for money. I realised we can get a lot more out of this white paint. The skirting boards could do with a coat and so would all dado rails, door frames and doors. covings and ceiling can also be painted with this paint. That should deal with a lot of eye sores. Door thresholds. The door thresholds or not one being present was another eyesore. It was a bit complicated as they were of different widths and different levels and connected a wooden laminate floor to a carpet floor. At B&Q, I found a wide metal door threshold which seemed would suit the job. I bought it, brought it home, measured the threshold length, cut it with the angle grinder using a metal cutting blade that worked like magic. Placed it and screwed it and everything worked. Only problem was one of the doors became a bit difficult to close. That would be a whole new job as I will have to take it off the hinges, take it downstairs and use my planer to trim the bottom end of the door, bring it back and fix it at the hinges again. I will leave that for later. But everyone is pleased to find a neat floor with door thresholds in place. Kitchen hood. The kitchen hood is beyond any cleaning. It drips oil, so sticky you don't want to touch it. It must smell but we are used to it all. It doesn't work any way as it has needed a new filter a long time ago but no one has dared to change the filter as no one would dare touch it. Thankfully the kitchen hoods are not all that expensive and we can get a decent one for less than £50. It is old anyway and any amount of cleaning would not make it look like new. So we decided to use a new one. In fact the kitchen hood removed from the kitchen of another property would be just right as it was fairly new condition. So we brought that hood home. Disconnected the electrics from old Kitchen hood at the wall plug and that made the microwave and refrigerator to stop working. So the electricity went from this plug to those sockets. The old hood was easy to remove as it just hangs from two nails on the wall. The new hood needs two nails on the walls as well and we marked the place, drilled the wall placed the plastic wall plugs for the screws and screwed the screws in. Connecting the electrics was tricky as the live wires would be dagerous to connect. Found the main switch for that socket, switched it off and connected the wires. It is a bit tricky as the circuit gets a bit complicated as the live wires goes on the supply other sockets. We guessed how it all worked and luckily we were right. It took a few attempts of connecting and disconnecting before everything was connected properly and tight and secure. When we switched on the mainswitch, microwave and friz didn't work. Switched off the main switch and checked the connections again and it seemed the negative terminal was loose. Tightened the connections again, switched the main switch on and this time microwave and friz worked and so did the new hood. There was one problem. The new hood is a bit wider and the tiled backsplash is extending under the hood for about 2 cms. Therefore it is not sitting snugly on the wall and you have a gap. Also, the hood is not connected to the external exhaust pipe. To connect to the exhaust pipe, I have to remove a vent cover on the top that has been screwed in. I can access the screws due to the exahust pipe coming in the way. So, off comes the hood from the screws on which it hangs, removed the vent cover and placed it back on the screws to hang from the wall. The exhause hood is a bit too big for the vent but fortunately flexible just enough to be able to connect it to the hood. So the hood is now nicely connected to the exhaust pipe. The tiled backsplash extending under the hood has become an eyesore now and I can't tolerate to see it. Next day evening, I got the idea that it is possible to cut it with the angle grinder using a metal cutting blade. So quickly marked the line with a pencil and it took only a few minutes to cut it and the tiles were cut neatly by hammering a screwdriver used as a chisel at the cut line. The hood now hung snugly from the wall without that terrible gap. There is another eyesore now. The old hood was wider and there is an uncovered area on both sides of the new hood that is neither tiled nor covered with the wall paper. It will be dealt with when we deal with the wall covering of the kitchen. Degreaser. I stumbled upon this 'elbow degreaser' at the supermarket while searching for a plain water sprayer which I couldn't find one. It cost only a pound, so I thought I would quickly use up the degreaser and clean the empty sprayer to fill with plain water for spraying. But when I used it, I found out how powerful degreaser it is! so far the best degreaser I had was the dettol. This was better than Dettol for degreasing. I I sprayed it on the kitchen cooker back splash(which looked like needed replacing due to the thick coat of grease). I did one swipe of scrubber on the tiles and I exclaimed in delight. It was working. Finally I found something that would actually make it possible to clean this backsplash. It was better than the washing up liquid, better than the shampoo, better than the soaps, better than scraping and even better than the Dettol. I sprayed it on the cooker top as well and now they are all as clean as they can be. Very pleased with the 'elbow degreaser'. Hard Grease on the bath. The bath has some hardened grease on it that is making it a real eye sore. It was the result of bathing my oiled son in it and not cleaning the grease immediately after the bath. During the cold winter months, the oil set very quickly as hard grease and it was impossible to clean with any thing. Although the degreaser was a bit effective, it would be impossible to take it all off using it. I found that the best way to take it off was to scrape it off. So, a lot of scraping of for the next 45 minutes and the bath is nice and clean. Not an eye sore anymore. It is old and would still need changing to a new one, but it will do for now.

A good road

For a community roads are like arteries and veins of a body. We would consider a healthy vascular system as a very important aspect of that body's wellbeing. Similarly good quality roads are a very important aspect of wellbeing of a community.
We can find evidence that roads were given enormous importance throughout the history. We read that emperors like Ashoka, Sher Shah Suri planted trees by the roadside and erected facilities for the road users. We read a lot about the 'silk route' that connected east to the west. We read about Romans and their road building technology. These are facts from more than 2000 years ago.

Safety
Road Safety is dependent on a number of factors. They can be broadly divided into two groups. Factors inherent to the surface and Factors inherent to the people and vehicles on the surface.

Maintenance-The fact that roads have been built and rebuilt for thousands of years and they are still an issue is mainly because they need constant maintenance. A road without maintenance is only as good as a road before it was constructed. Any road deteriorates with use and time. The cost of maintenance of a road should be taken in to consideration when building a road.

Road=a surface on which people and vehicles can travel from one place to another in opposite directions with the surface having a specific level of quality over a specific period of time.

Cost of building a Road= Cost of a road at a specific level of quality for a specified period of time.