I've not had much sleep for the last two nights thanks to the smoke alarm in the living room. About 6.3oam yesterday morning it started bleeping, ok, simple, just change the battery but no, it's a sealed unit smoke alarm which is connected into the mains electrical system and it has a rechargeable lithium battery which is supposed to last ten years!
so hubby pressed the reset button and it went quiet ....
(In the meantime we telephoned the repairs department and they said they were going to contact a local contractor and it will be fixed in the next 7 days!) I also e-mailed the local fire brigade to see if we were still safe without this smoke alarm being connected. There are three others in the house.
.....until approx 6ish this morning. So hubby gets up and pressed the re-set button and nothing, it just carried on bleeping, every 45 seconds!
So after about an hour I got up and telephoned the out of house repairs number and there was no answer! So I left an irate message, then turned off the mains power downstairs, it was still bleeping! so I got a screwdriver and disconnected it and it was still bleeping!
About ten minutes later I got a phone call from the emergency repairs dept saying that they would follow it up as soon as the main repairs dept was open at 9am and also a bit of a chat that the emergency number was for burst pipes etc. Which is fair enough but I pointed out that we had waited for a return phone call yesterday from the contractor and nothing....
Anyway just after 9am, a telephone call from the repairs department, the contractor will try to fit us in between now and 4.30pm
Edit....the contractor came about an hour ago and we have a new and hopefully quiet smoke alarm!
After researching on the internet, it looks like its a manufacture fault, Dicon
and reading other people with similar problems, trying to dispose of it, drowning it, burying it and smashing it! It seems they also had a 'Terminator' smoke alarm!
Josie x
the checked fabric is an old jacket I've recycled, it's just been hung in the wardrobe for the last ten years, it was a lovely jacket but it didn't look lovely on me, I've only worn it once when we ( me, hubby, son, mum and dad went to York Minster to celebrate the start of the year 2000, so it has special memories for me), 
This is what the leaf fabric looks like cut out into the leaf shapes, I think it looks great....
and this is as far as I've got. This is the first large quilt I've made and what I'm finding difficult because it's a rag quilt is that the seams are on the 'right' side of the fabric and the neat edges are the 'wrong' side. 
But the 'wrong' side looks just as nice as the right side. 
I thought I would have eight weeks to finish the quilt but last week someone from decent homes came round and checked the combi-boiler and central heating (which works okay and we are happy with) and he has told us we are having a radiator in the downstairs toilet and the combi-boiler will be taken out and a normal boiler put in, so that will mean a hot water tank in one of the bedrooms, we think it will be son's/ Kitt's bedroom, so that means now that we've had to find someone to look after the cats for four weeks (we've spoken to the woman who did a home-check for Millie from Cats Protection and she says she will have them - £8 a day for both cats) and we were going to put all the boxed up stuff from the kitchen and bathroom in there! The man from decent homes says that when he comes round the work usually starts within a month, so we think it will be November. Great timing, as hubby has got two weeks holiday from work, so instead of chilling out and going out, we are going to be stuck in with noise and dust and half the house in boxes for four working weeks and living off microwave meals!
