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Wisdom required


nabbers
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So....Its 1986 and putting your traditional home back to how it was in Victorian times is all the rage and as a carpenter its keeping me busy.    I stumble across 2 beautiful old kitchen ranges the sort with a fire, oven made from cast Iron in some derelict cottages and ask the owner if he wants to sell them.   He offers to swap them for my mini pickup that I paid £300 for.    I figure I can sell them for over £1000 so we do the deal.

Taking them out, I crack 2 of the cast iron panels and a builder friend recommends that I take them to Blacksmith type fella in a little village about 35 miles from where I live and I do that.  The guy is busy and we agree a price for welding and sandblasting the ranges.   I call in over several weeks and he hasn't got around to it, then his wife dies and his workshop is neglected and someone tells me he has got offshore working on drilling platforms.  He's moved out of his cottage, workshop compound all locked up,   I gradually forget about the ranges, no response to notes left.

 

5 Years ago I move to the same area, the blacksmith is long gone.

Last night I'm in my local and the range is smoking badly, I start chatting to the Landlord and mention the ranges I once owned and the guy who had them.   He then says he bought a range from him and its in the next room, it had needed some welding doing,   I've seen it a million times when I've been in there, but now I look at it with fresh eyes!    It's one of the ones I left with the guy all that time ago for repair, a particularly nice compact example.   All painted up and shiny it looks exactly like I thought it would when I handed over the keys to my pick up!

Felt a mixture of emotions!

What would you do?  I drink in the place all the time and now have a reminder of my folly! 

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The pub landlord ain't the guilty party, it's the blacksmith fella! Find him and ask him to pay up! If he doesn't, get a statement from the pub landlord...and if you can prove you owned it in the first place, take the blacksmith to the small claimed court...............or just forget it and put it down to experience! ☹️

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Sit by said stove with a pint and enjoy as there is an alternative story.

Fellow NCO at our station buys an old blacksmith's property - house and forge -  in an outlying village. Everyone thought that he'd pay the £1000 to have it demolished, but, no, he paid the £800 and decided to refurbish. A few weeks later, having demolished an internal wall he asked if I'd pop over and have a look at the old biscuit tin that he'd found in a cupboard set in a wall of the small room that this demolishion had revealed. As a bye the bye, this tin ended up in the well known gunsmith's in the local market town. On showing the tin to the owner, he shouted upstairs and down came the resident 'smith; " my grandfather loaded those", he said. As a result one display window was taken out and replaced with a 'woodland shooting scene' with well over 100 cartridges from the tin spread about. I never paid full price for anything I bought there after that.

I got to the property - the house, but couldn't make myself heard over a lot of smashing and bashing coming from within so in I go. A bombsite summed the place up. Found where the wall no longer was and the cupboard but there was another wall apparently missing and the noise was coming from behind where it had been. I shouted out and went in. There he was, covered in soot wielding a dirty great big 14lb sledge and in a tone which broked no argument, told me to collect the bits of iron scattered about and toss them in the field behind his garden wall. He kept smashing and I kept carrying until any evidence of whatever on earth the object had been was removed. He then explained that as he was up for every home improvement grant that it was possible to obtain, the inspector had decided to come out on a Saturday morning and assess the whole lot in one full sweep and was imminently due. He went on to explain that had the inspector seen this particular stove he would have slapped a preservation order on the property on the spot and put paid to matey's plans for once and for all. I can't now remember what the stove was called, but we were talking the early 1500s apparently.

He got all of his grants.

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2 hours ago, nabbers said:

So....Its 1986 and putting your traditional home back to how it was in Victorian times is all the rage and as a carpenter its keeping me busy.    I stumble across 2 beautiful old kitchen ranges the sort with a fire, oven made from cast Iron in some derelict cottages and ask the owner if he wants to sell them.   He offers to swap them for my mini pickup that I paid £300 for.    I figure I can sell them for over £1000 so we do the deal.

Taking them out, I crack 2 of the cast iron panels and a builder friend recommends that I take them to Blacksmith type fella in a little village about 35 miles from where I live and I do that.  The guy is busy and we agree a price for welding and sandblasting the ranges.   I call in over several weeks and he hasn't got around to it, then his wife dies and his workshop is neglected and someone tells me he has got offshore working on drilling platforms.  He's moved out of his cottage, workshop compound all locked up,   I gradually forget about the ranges, no response to notes left.

 

5 Years ago I move to the same area, the blacksmith is long gone.

Last night I'm in my local and the range is smoking badly, I start chatting to the Landlord and mention the ranges I once owned and the guy who had them.   He then says he bought a range from him and its in the next room, it had needed some welding doing,   I've seen it a million times when I've been in there, but now I look at it with fresh eyes!    It's one of the ones I left with the guy all that time ago for repair, a particularly nice compact example.   All painted up and shiny it looks exactly like I thought it would when I handed over the keys to my pick up!

Felt a mixture of emotions!

What would you do?  I drink in the place all the time and now have a reminder of my folly! 

Free drink!!!

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Had a large cast iron range in our farmhouse back in the 40s and 50s....I was born in 1940 and without doubt my crib was set beside that range because it was the only warm place in the three storey farm house. My grandmother turned out the most fantastic food from the two ovens and I can see her in my minds eye now, gently scraping the embers into one corner of the fire, just to get the temperature right for the victoria sandwich she had in there and my mouth starts watering to this day.  Amazing what women produced from those stoves back then and banked up with a mix of coal and coke it would still be in next morning.

Our back door was never locked and not a surprise to find the loacl bobby warming his feet whilst waiting to make his Point with the Sergeant outside our gate at midnight.

Ours was fired with coal and coke. We had a gas works 3 miles away in Tamworth, Staffs and coke was readily available. It was between the river and the railway line/viaduct, Amington turn.

Definitely the good old days.

Edited by Walker570
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On ‎01‎/‎01‎/‎2019 at 10:33, nabbers said:

So....Its 1986 and putting your traditional home back to how it was in Victorian times is all the rage and as a carpenter its keeping me busy.    I stumble across 2 beautiful old kitchen ranges the sort with a fire, oven made from cast Iron in some derelict cottages and ask the owner if he wants to sell them.   He offers to swap them for my mini pickup that I paid £300 for.    I figure I can sell them for over £1000 so we do the deal.

Taking them out, I crack 2 of the cast iron panels and a builder friend recommends that I take them to Blacksmith type fella in a little village about 35 miles from where I live and I do that.  The guy is busy and we agree a price for welding and sandblasting the ranges.   I call in over several weeks and he hasn't got around to it, then his wife dies and his workshop is neglected and someone tells me he has got offshore working on drilling platforms.  He's moved out of his cottage, workshop compound all locked up,   I gradually forget about the ranges, no response to notes left.

 

5 Years ago I move to the same area, the blacksmith is long gone.

Last night I'm in my local and the range is smoking badly, I start chatting to the Landlord and mention the ranges I once owned and the guy who had them.   He then says he bought a range from him and its in the next room, it had needed some welding doing,   I've seen it a million times when I've been in there, but now I look at it with fresh eyes!    It's one of the ones I left with the guy all that time ago for repair, a particularly nice compact example.   All painted up and shiny it looks exactly like I thought it would when I handed over the keys to my pick up!

Felt a mixture of emotions!

What would you do?  I drink in the place all the time and now have a reminder of my folly! 

put it behind you and move on its a new year trying to come good on the deal will only destroy you and eat you up inside    look forward not back

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18 hours ago, moose man said:

Every time I looked at the range I’d think about the mini , you seen what a tidy mini is worth today ? 😳

Yeah man, that's the problem!    And I just checked to see what ranges sell for on Ebay now.....£1000-£3000!

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