Cazmanian_minx's MFi3 diary

Kaz2904

Something about places like these fill me with excitement.
It looks beautiful and I really hope you get it.
Lots of work to be done but you (depending on your level of skill) ought to be able to do a top notch job for less than £20k I reckon.
That bathroom is vast- you could have a lovely roll top bath and a victorian style vanity sink unit- maybe even get a shower in there.
Love the size of the kitchen too. Can I come and live with you when it's done please?

auntie_brenda

Emmmm....... at least the grass has been cut .

House lovely on outside & great setting.

Inside :eek:, but just clearing it will help you, and it looks sound (assuming you photo'd all the bad bits!). Rooms look big and what on earth do you have planned for that groovy big room - banqueting suite for your DFW friends I hope!

Am v envious. Would love a project. first need to tech other half what a hammer is & how to wallpaper.....


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cazmanian_minx

Aunite Brenda - the big room will be a sort of library/chilling out room with comfortable armchairs and lots and lots of books, as opposed to the current living room which will have the TV/stereo etc. etc. in it.

I've found an aerial photo which shows the house - the small pale-green square near the bottom of the centre of the picture is the bowling green and over the road from it are three houses. The one we're interested in is the middle one :j :j :j

http://www.alanmoar.flyer.co.uk/Caithness/Lybster/002.htm

Nothing we can do until we instruct our solicitor with the offer details next Friday, so in the meantime it's back to my regularly-scheduled MFW-ing!

Today's actually quite an important day for me, because 15th September 2006 was my last day of full-time paid employment. One year on and I've gone from just scraping by to living quietly but comfortably - hopefully I can have the same sort of increase again over the next 12 months.

eBay turnover is now a steady £800-£1,000 a week, but next week I'm putting in a big order to one of my suppliers to expand my range into a new area of jewellery-making, so it'll be interesting to see how my customers react. It's something that's under-represented on eBay at the moment and I'm not sure if that's because people have tried selling this stuff and it hasn't worked, or whether it genuinely is an area open for a new opportunity. Only one way to find out...

I sent an email to the journalist who'd posted the info about my last transcription job on JournoBiz to thank her and she's taken my details as well, so that's another possible opportunity. Seems my mother was right about always remembering to say thank you Another writing friend is celebrating this week after being commissioned to write a tips book - I have a couple of ideas that would fit nicely into the same series, so I'm going to pitch to them this week (it'll give me something else other than the house to get nervous about!).

No news yet on the stories I sent out - both magazines I sent to are very quick to come back with a NO but take longer to say YES, so I'm hoping that they've made it past first reader stage.

I'm also enrolled on the OU photography course now - Gods knows how I'm going to find the time, but I think it's important I have some me-time and you never know, I might be able to improve enough to become sellable

Back to the stock mountain now - the aim is to get all the little bits and pieces lying around the place counted, bagged and listed so that the decks are completely clear for the abovementioned big order.

Kaz2904

Caz, that's quite an income! Do you sell jewelery or just the components for making it?
You obviously put in some hours though.
The place looks fabulous. Is it really that tiny?
When we went on holiday to Scotland a few years ago DH couldn't believe it. He said that every town we drove through was a council estate surrounded by great big impressive houses and golf courses. I'd never really looked at it like that before having always just looked at the beautiful big houses on the roads we were on.
My Mum's from near Troon in Ayrshire, that's beautiful too. My Granddads road was a little bit like your picture when I was small but now it's like a town in itself. Very sad to see the sprawl overtaking everything.

cazmanian_minx

Kaz - just the components. I used to make jewellery too, but I'm pretty rubbish at it! Yes, the village really is that tiny There's a little bit more at the top of the street, but that's it. Can't find a population figure just for Lybster, but the whole of south east Caithness (Lybster, Clyth, Latheronwheel, Dunbeath and Berridale) has a population of around 1,700 people. Nice and empty!

I think money's going to be a bit tight again this month. I got my contact lens prescription yesterday, so have been able to order my lenses online - £73.99 for 6 months plus £12.09 cashback for buying through Quidco. It would have been a lot less, but the astigmatism in my right eye has now got bad enough for me to need a toric lens. There's only one company that makes toric extended wear lenses and unfortunately they're not cheap - £8 a lens with 20% cashback is the cheapest I've found.

Then on Friday I have to take my elderly moggy to the vet for her 6 monthly blood tests (about £100), 6 months of Fortekor tablets (about £180) and special diet for her failing kidneys (about £75). Good thing I've just got a new credit card with 0% on purchases for 3 months! (Decided to ditch my NatWest mastercard after 12 years because they're not giving me airmiles any more - have gone for Tesco to get clubcard points instead!)

All of which is eating into the mortgage overpayment money. However, I have two very large stock orders arriving this week (hopefully one of them will turn up today, since the company rang me yesterday to let me know what out of stocks there were) and I think I've managed to find a company in Europe who'll supply me with factory packs of Swarovski beads :T :T :T :T, which is something I've been wanting to move into for a while. They're sending me a catalogue and price list, so I can start calculator-bashing to find out whether it's going to be cheaper to get them from them or from the USA. With shipment, VAT, import duty and carrier admin charges, the USA ones are going to have to be about 20% cheaper to be in competition and since this European company is located in a neighbouring country to the Swarovski factory and offers free P&P on orders over £100, I have a feeling it's going to be no competition...

Reading back, I see I never mentioned the CDs (probably too embarrassed ). My first eBay venture, many years ago, involved going to car boot sales, picking up classical CDs for 50p and reselling on eBay (I used to be a classical music buyer for HMV). It did moderately well, but listing was a pain, so I stopped. When the shop was having a quiet period over the summer, I started looking at some of the classical job lots and bought a couple of promising ones. I now have around 200 CDs stacked in a corner of my bedroom and no time to list the things!! Ebay still hasn't added classical recordings to its library of track listings, so they'll all have to be done by hand - think I might put as much of it as I can on Amazon instead and then just get rid of the rest in a job lot. Might pay the vet bill!

Caz

cazmanian_minx

I bumped into my downstairs neighbour yesterday (we live on the top floor of a converted Edwardian semi), who has just paid off her mortgage - there's motivation for me! She's now planning on selling up and buying a house with her other half, but is going to do the kitchen and bathroom first, she's been so focussed on getting rid of the mortgage that she's been putting up with them for years. (We finally caved and did the bathroom ourselves earlier this year, but still have the original 80s kitchen and a lot of the original 80s beige woodchip wallpaper!)

It's been a frustrating couple of days. I had a rejection letter from a magazine (boo!), one of my suppliers managed to screw up transferring my order onto their computer system and sent me 1s/10s/100s of things I'd ordered 10s/100s/1000s of (boo!) and turnover in the shop has been down this week.

On the plus side - the vet bill was £100 less than I was expecting (so that's another £100 in the mortgage kitty, if you'll excuse the pun) and my cat is responding really well to the tablets and diet, her blood test results were normal which means her kidneys are coping fine with what she's eating :T

We should find out on Tuesday afternoon whether we've got the house or not - or, to put it another way, whether we have another £81k of debt to pay off! If we get it, the mortgage on that one will be OH's sole responsibility and although he can pay 10% of the balance off each year without penalty (as long as it's in the form of a cheque of £2k or more - picky, or what??) he's going to be paying just the basic amount and chucking all his spare money at the repairs, we're hoping to be able to pay for the refurbishment without borrowing any more to give us a bigger equity margin in case of a slump in the economy.

Caz

cazmanian_minx

Ha! 133 CDs listed on Amazon this morning - I feel accomplished!! The remainder can't go on because there's no Amazon screen for them, so the rare ones will go on eBay and the rest will go to the charity shop. I've gone for an Amazon Pro selling account, because I think I can sell more than 33 items in 30 days (the break-even point for it being worth it), but will probably cancel it after a month.

Kaz2904

That's some going caz! I was ready to end it all after I spent a whole evening listing 28 books on there!
I have got quite a few more that I need to list too. I don't tend to go for the pro seller because I don't think I would sell enough. Last time I only sold 3 books but made a total profit of £6 something. So it was okish!

catshark88

Caz and Kaz, am well impressed. I seem to spend half a day listing about 2 books and then make a profit of about 20p!

Sales are going to be non existant with me this week. I was due to photograph an event on sat. but it had to be cancelled due to Foot & Mouth restrictions (the venue is also an agricultural college).

mountainlioness

CM - just checked out the photos and wow, it's gonna be amazing! Fimgers crossed for you getting it and do keep us all updated with your progress