Stanley is cooking our 4 bird roast for New Years Day dinner!

Stevie giving Stanley range a good clean and polish

dinner cooked !

Standing  in the kitchen on the flagstone floor for the past 50 years is the great rusting hulk of a Stanley range.  Hes like a Aga but the poorer, older relative.   He's beige and brown just like an old mans cardigan.  When we arrived at Lanoy he was standing in a ingle nook covered in years of dust, cobwebs, cement dust and plaster.  He was totally defunct.  Only fit for the scrapyard.

We had a chap in to service the oil logburner thingy in the snug  last week.  He told us it was a miracle that we managed to get the thing lit and working, with out killing ourselves with carbon monoxide poisoning.  He spent 2 hours meticulously taking it apart, cleaning it, dusting it with fine brushes, vacumining its insides, replacing small rusty parts, and putting it all back together like some sort of ironmongery  krypton factor challange. ..

As he walked through the kitchen he had spotted  Stanley and asked us what we were going to do with him.. ''dunno..scrap probably'' was our initial answer.  However,   he thought it was worth taking a closer look at.  Before long Stanley was in bits on the floor.  The man had a caving light fixed on his head and he was peering into the belly of Stanley....much, grinding, rubbing, scraping and vacumming later... the old fella roared into life !.  ( Stanley not the engineer)  There wasnt  much oil left in the huge oil tank outside the kitchen window , so we jacked the tank up at one end with a car jack so that the oil ran to one end..just enough to feed through the pipework to Stanley..and there he was, very much alive   Alive and Kicking out some heat, ressurected  after probably 20 years of neglect.Hes been roaring life into this old house for a good week now...all the radiators are lovely and warm and the dampness in the house is dissapating gradually.

Monday we cleaned him, with caustic soda gel. scrubbed him, till he began to shine again...
Tuesday, whilst shopping i bought a big enamel roasting pot with a lid, and a 4 bird roast.

Stevie asked me'' what on earth i was going to do with that? ''

Today ..... The bird is in the roasting pot, surrounded by potatoes and parsnips inside Stanleys oven .  The smell of roast dinner is wafting though the building
Stanley is cooking our dinner for tonight :)

The rain, has stopped at last.
Stevie is painting walls in the hall
Me mum has just been for a stroll down the lane
the cat is sleeping on top of the wardrobe
and im telling you this tale

its fun living in the country

x
Jo