some bint has just been round saying she's representing the gas company in regards to giving us a grant for insulation

ok, so i thought i'd give it a whirl and see what the crack was, being that i've already been quoted £2500 to properly insulate the loft with a window in it and vents and that sort of stuff to a rating where it will be useable if i do a loft conversion

so i asked a few question and she just said it was a european thing and the gas companies had already given them the pot of money and they were now dishing it out to eligable properties, yeah right

she first said that it would cost around £2k if i were to get someone to do it but the grant she was garanteeing me would give me an 80% cover of the cost

so some questions later she said the grant would leave me to pay a total of £200, but surely that's only 10%?

no no no, you'd only have to pay £199 and that would cover your 20%

them numbers don't add up so i was about to shut the door in her face but the kids started to run about the place

anyway, she ended up going upstairs to look at the loft, then she said she knew it would be 55 sq/m and it would cost £1000, already spinning her web of deciet about the cost by lying about the grant level so i donned my paxman hat and set about quizzing her further

and then she said that regulations meant that we needed 11 inches of insulation to meet government guidelines, that we wouldn't be able to use the loft afterwards as the insulation would be 7 inches above the joists, etc

so how do you get the 7 extra inches then?

you don't, they lay down a line of 6 inch, then cross it over with another layer of 6 inch

at which point i politely pointed her towards the stairs and out of the door, even my mrs was thinking to herself "what a dumb bitch, didn't know wtf she was talking about , even i understood she was chatting shit"

so, who else has got 11 inches worth of insulations in their loft, on the floor, and now can;'t use their lofts?

oh yes, she said she'd started late in the day (4) and had done loads of houses on our street already, but when i said "which ones?" she only gave out 2 numbers from across the road, one of the houses i know the guy very well and he's not the sort to give her more than 2 seconds, and because she'd started late she was going to have to come back tomorrow and monday, so when i said i'd chat to her tomorrow after i'd checked her credentials out she said she wasn't coming back to give out quotes but refernce numbers, but she won't have time, and so on and so forth

i did have the cheek to ask for a small sum towards the heat loss while she'd been standing in the door for 10 minutes and she gave me such a dirty look