Nice People Thread Part 9 - and so it continues

neverdespairgirl

lostinrates wrote: »

I don't have and don't want an aga

Having a less romantic view of such iconic things than many, the only thing I think they do better then anything ele is toast. We don't eat that much bread . They are a great and wonderful lifestyle thing, I'm not knocking them, they just aren't for me. ( I'm very familiar with them, its not a 'when you get used to them kind of thing...its quite the opposite in fact. )

I've never had a gas range though, and the oil ones have only ever been serviced annually, with the boiler, and when they get the annual clean . Solid fuel ones have been twice a year though.....i

I adore Agas - when my parents bought their first Kent house, when i was 8, it had a solid fuel brand-free range cooker that heated the water as well, and when my mother replaced the kitchen, she went for a gas-fired Aga (with orange bottles outside, no mains gas). Then in their London house, the one they sold just before Christmas, she put in a 4-oven gas Aga, and in the current Kent house, a 2 oven oil-fired Aga with an electric oven, 4 ring bottle gas stove, and microwave.

They are glorious to cuddle up to in the winter (if you can get past sisters / dogs / etc) and they cook meraingues beautifully.

lostinrates

Yep, they are good to read on, but its not that healthy to sit on them!

Fires are just as lovely IMO.

Edit...in fact, I prefer fires. Vastly.

michaels

WE grew up with Agas and my parents still have one - yes you want to be near it but only because the rest of the place is so darn cold - I would rather feel warm and comfortable everywhere and only run the cooker when I am cooking., especially in the summer when of course cooking and the kitchen become too hot. And of course any non- integrated cooker is always dirty with gaps and cracks for dirt/food to go down - yuck.

PasturesNew

I've never seen an Aga used in real life. I'd not fancy one - looks like a hassle of learning/overhead.

When I grew up, the council house had a big kitchen with a coal/log burner in the corner as it was pre-central heating days so there was the black iron fire in the kitchen and an open fire in the living room (no other heating anywhere), then dad bought a house and the kitchen was dinky - probably not much bigger than an Aga.

Dad bought mum a new electric oven in about 1968 but they appear to have left it behind when they moved 30 years later (no idea why, nothing wrong with it). House they bought had an old/grotty oven in it (that leaned), but dad refused to have it changed - and it was there until I had it ripped out right before I sold their house 16 years later.

silvercar

Annual season ticket from here is slightly over £2k. Given that we are on the edge of the green belt, that is good value.

I'm sure it is a student rate but DS2 pays £200 for an annual bus ticket in Manchester.

lostinrates

Well.....we got planning for our stables at the same time as the house.....and today they finally released on satisfaction of a condition.


Who hoo.

(I'm actually not that fussed about building stables but ought to get on with it now I suppose.......I'm actually thinking I might just do what I saw someone else do and get big bales in as temporary walls and use electric fencing gates as doors. Ha. That'll teach 'em.


Actually, I'd be happy to lay concrete blocks for this myself, but not the floor I don't think. But then we got quotes for laying the slab and by 'Eck that's expensive. I'm seriously considering us having ago ourselves. The tough bit i would think would be getting the fall right when we haven't got a clue what we are doing at all with concrete. Laying it any old way would be tough, laying with a drainage fall might be even tougher!

LydiaJ

PasturesNew wrote: »

Many bus passes don't cost a lot less - going to meagre-pay jobs in nowheresville.

£2-3 was what I typically paid to get 2 miles into towns last time I used buses.

Here there are "weekly tickets" but only for one bus co - and there are three companies, who are supposed to work together but they don't, so it's confusing to even buy a bus ticket that gets you from A to B. Just checked. It'd cost me £24/week for a ticket to get to a lot of places, up to about 10 miles away. After that it's another ticket. Also, transport's unreliable and there are no interconnecting routes.

Well, yes, but £24/week is a heck of a lot less than £97.70/week for michaels. Nobody was suggesting that transport is more expensive per mile in London - it clearly isn't - but that Londoners end up living a lot further from their workplaces than us provincials, and therefore end up with more total spending on transport.

If you live in London you either spend loads on public transport but save on the cost of owning and running a car - which is then massively inconvenient when you want to go on holiday or something else outside of London and don't have a car to go there in - or else you spend loads on public transport and also spend the same as everyone else on owning a car, even though you don't use it all that often.

My daily commute (in a car) is 7 miles total - home to DD's school to my work to DD's school to home. The petrol cost for that is about £8/week, and tomorrow it won't cost anything because she and I will be going on bikes so she's got her bike at school for cycling club after school.

vivatifosi

michaels wrote: »

It costs my work 97.70 a week for me to get there and back on the train, I'm glad it doesn't come out of my net pay :eek:
A single ion the bus from the station to the stop nearest mine which I guess is about a mile and a bit is £2.30 :eek: Diesel to go that far by car would be 25p (but parking is about £9 per day at the station :eek:)

Having seen a job in Farringdon in my previous field of work I have to admit being mildy interested until I saw your post re travel costs. Money is a lot better, but by the time you add in the cost of getting there and the additional faff factor and work/life balance compared to working close to home, I'm beginning to think I'm better staying local.

PasturesNew

LydiaJ wrote: »

My daily commute (in a car) is 7 miles total - home to DD's school to my work to DD's school to home. The petrol cost for that is about £8/week, and tomorrow it won't cost anything because she and I will be going on bikes so she's got her bike at school for cycling club after school.

I've usually worked 20-50 miles from home. Trying to never do that again. Where I am right now, the jobs are 8-15 miles away probably. Certainly the main town is.

I always put my car running cost down as a ballpark 15p/mile including fuel. Probably not including depreciation though.

fc123

chewmylegoff wrote: »

Zag - the big white tower is now up for auction.

From an initial listing price of (I think) £2.5m they have set a guide price of £850,000.
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-40160750.html

It's out of our price range unfortunately, so you've got a free run at it.

ooooh I like that one...can't you push to it Chewy?...or make a lesser offer...then we can have an NP meet in the tower. The pic of the stairs is gorgeous.

lostinrates wrote: »

We're ok.

Not too cold now, we have a few plug in heaters, (dogs have one on now) and we're certainly decided to put some oil in as temporary whole provision and then be a back up if anything goes wrong with the rest longer term.

I'm looking forward to a bath in a month or so! .

No bath at all? OMG I would struggle with that. Our worst 'not have' was the 48 hours with no toilet. Enjoy when you get it.:)

lostinrates wrote: »

Yep, they are good to read on, but its not that healthy to sit on them!

Fires are just as lovely IMO.

Edit...in fact, I prefer fires. Vastly.

Just to say we chose a 'Stove'. It is called a Firebox and it's over budget so we may not get it until next year now...but it's worth the wait.


Having had 3 years of the 10 minute commute, I don't think I could go back through choice to anything longer each day....unless 'needs must'.
Our worst commute was to Brighton when I ran the shop 5 days P Wk for over a year (and also when we first opened her) . Sometimes I would have a 2 hour journey home if the traffic was bad on M25.
It was the stress of the driving 2 -3 hours a day that led us to move down there as the shop ran so much better with me running it.