Pat & Roger go shopping

David Cameron would be proud of us. For it seems Pat and I are staging a two-person campaign to jump start the country's  high street spending. Yes, the big spend has started as the boys start preparing for the fit-out of the Cat’s Whiskers.

I really wanted, wherever possible, to buy stuff made in the UK, but I think I was more than a little naive to think that was possible.

Shoreline RF88

We started with the fridge/freezer. We needed a 12v one. Well, we didn’t really. We could buy an an ordinary 240v household unit but that was going to mean huge burden on the boats invertor, as this bit of kit is on all day and night, and is working at its hardest in the summer months, when we will be most active on the boat.  I am getting somewhat paranoid about our electrical consumption. I think it will be trend regular readers of our blog will spot as time goes on. So it’s 12v all the way, where possible. Though there was not a lot of choice when we were looking for the fridge freezer, but Pat has selected a Shoreline (picture below).

Next came the request from the boys at Kingfisher about lighting. We had agreed to go with LED, but they needed to know how many positions we wanted and where they should go. Also requested was how we wanted them switched, closely followed by power point requests. On both the power and lighting we have had to make a few compromises, but we are quite happy with what has been agreed.

Siemens EC615PB90E

Pat has sourced the hob she wants through John Lewis. It’s a Siemans. I wanted a Hotpoint but my pals in the electrical department warned me off.

Sony CDX-GT450U

Whole House FM Transmitter

I got the car stereo yesterday. This will be our “entertainment system”. It’s a Sony unit,  that Halfords had on a half-price offer. Not sure about the speakers yet, but probably going to go with two speakers from Pioneer that will be dropped into the roof space. I was going to spend a bit more and go down the Bluetooth route, but  I put a post on the Canal World Forum site and several boaters came back to say Bluetooth is OK, but we would be better off getting an FM transmitter. I have sourced one from the US that runs on 12 volts (picture below).

Avtex TV/DVD Combi

We have also sorted out our TV/DVD unit. Again, it’s 12v and we stock it in John Lewis, though its only available on-line. I get discount wherever it is sourced, so that has saved us a tiny sum. The attraction of the unit, an Avtex (no, I had never heard of them either), is that there is a USB port on the side. This means I can record programmes to either a memory stick or hard drive. I bought a 1Tb drive a while back to put all my CD’s and photo on, and there is loads of space left, so I will rip a load of DVD’s, for those inevitable times when we are in the middle of nowhere and cannot get any reception.

John asked me to start thinking about a bookcase/ TV surround and I have designed one to scale, that Pat thinks is OK, and will give us what we need. I sent it to John and he thinks it will work.  It’s one of the things we will discuss next Friday when we pay our three-weekly visit to Trent Lock to see the boat’s progress. We also hope to meet Jan Deuchar, the sign writer, who lives on a boat, moored at the lock.