22 Foxhole East

f0xh0les

Still stripping today.
I will vanquish the dreaded chip of wood paper. It is now becoming a battle of wills.
I have £70 for the rest of the week until CB comes in on Friday, but Friday also marks half term.
This month just seems to be dragging. i am not enjoying it. Might be because it was such a let down on the 1st with no wedding anniversary celebration or marking the day in any way. It just went downhill in a pile of wallpaper scrapings.

Anyway, DH is off at 12 for his friends' do, I am strpping wallpaper, doing laundry and cleaning the house today and trying to avoid the voyeuristic spectacle of the royal wedding. I could understand it if they showed half an hour before the ceremony started and half an hour after, but a full 5-6 hours on both main channels plus radio stations too. Honestly!
Oh well, it is a cause for people to celebrate and forget their troubles for a while, I suppose, and it will be doing great things locally for the economy.
Hope they are happy and that the sun shines for them.
I will tune in for the highlights, and watch the FA cup instead.

kerri_gt

Keep at th paper f0xh0les it will be worth it in the end.
Cup finals here today too, the wedding is nearby so we've had helicopters and the like going over sporadically this morning.

Sorry about the anniversary, ours is later this month, had been hoping to go out for a nice meal but we have some major expense coming up thanks to a cowboy builder last year (and a lovely one this year who is gonig to put stuff right) so it's been revised to a long walk if the weather is nice and a takeaway.

Did DS1 get deposited for his DofE this morning?

f0xh0les

Hi Kerri
Yes DH went flapping and quacking out of the house with DS1 with 20 minutes to go - all last minute because I decided to stay in bed this morning. Just for once. I had a lie in.

Just sat down for a cuppa while lunch is in the oven, and watching the american priest milking his 15 minutes of fame.
Quite funny watching the royals trying not to laugh.
He is such a ham!

I am attacking the walls with a vengance, the hamster is playing with a tissue - he looks like a bride in a veil - I thought it was fitting.

Off to do lunch.

Enjoy the sunshine I am going to enjoy myself

f0xh0les

All living room shelves have been screwed to the walls. They have been balanced to the ones on the other alcove. They look brilliant. Filled them up and I still have one spare!

The walls need plastering but at last the woodchip is all gone. Bare plaster looks horrid. Will need to ring baby plasterer for a quote. Get him booked in for after half term (more importantly, after dh pays me housekeeping)

There are no more piles of books loitering around the place. Things are starting to look less cluttered, more ordered, and as Nina Simone sang,
I'm feeling good, da-da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
you know what I mean?

I have bought the paint to finish the hall stairs and landing's last coat.
I have bought the paint for my bedroom to finish it.
I have bought more white paint for the final coat on the woodwork.

I have been to the hospice shop - a return visit now I have money, and all the things I wanted have gone. Should have snapped them up when I saw them, but I did not know how much all the paint and bits were going to cost, and then food shopping and excursions for half term which started yesterday. So the odd £5 here and there was going to add up, and I can really do another couple of weeks without a thermal insulated carafe for the breakfast table. It is a want not a need.

Then the petrol light came on. Typical.

Today I am cleaning the house - top to bottom - as it is the start of the holidays, and they can muck up their rooms as much as they like, but they will be clean for today. The sun is shining, the sky is grey, it is a good day for drying until thunder comes later, so I am doing all the bathmats, and towels and as much as I can get the boys to drag out of their bedrooms.

Their plans for half term involve going for a bike ride, going swimming and the xbox. That is all they want to do. And this time I am letting them.

Yesterday I had phone calls from step-gran to tell me the gardener has been there 3 days this week and the garden is still a mess.... I did not volunteer, stony silence.
Then m-i-l rang, and asked what my plans were for this half term and the summer holidays. I told her I hadn't made any.
So she asked when I was going over to see step-gran - they are about 90 miles distant from each other, so no distance at all in her eyes - I told her I had not booked anything and I had no plans yet. She could not get off the phone quick enough!

Not exactly exciting plans for the next week, but by the end of it, I am hoping to not need to paint anything above the ground floor until the bathroom is sorted. Which is not going to happen anytime soon if I keep having to pay out for the boat to Ireland up to 3x a year.

The hamster is still with us, he is over 18 months old now. I think of these things when I have to buy a bag of hamster food that lasts bloomin' ages.

Right, more washing to go out on the line, and then lunch and the market and then cleaning before a fun and thrilling evening of football matches.

Have a great bank holiday weekend everyone!

f0xh0les

Gas and Electric switch going through.
Just got my quarterly bill, and I am £16 in the red with them, with £77 going out on the 1st. Change over goes on the 6th so 2 x payments this month. Will claim back, but at least I know that I will get most of it back.

£5 Morrisons voucher to use
Postal survey going back today
Ran this morning -only 2km but I have to start slowly and get back into this, the asthma inhaler seemed to work on the pollen- induced problems. Just a shame I got cramp and had to slow it all down for. a while. Grr.

Half term!! yay!!

f0xh0les

Oooh! and in surprise news.

DH announced yesterday he has total combined saving of nearly £10k.

So, maybe that bathroom upstairs will get done this year.
IF, - and that is a very big IF, - I can actually get the money out of him.
It is not always easy....

wishingthemortgaheaway

Wow, he has been squirrelling things away. What about a match funding approach, he has to match the home improvement money you've already spent on the house?

f0xh0les

He would have to save for another couple of years for that!


He is worried his car will die, so needs enough put by for that, then he needs his tooth doing, so he needs money put by for that, then he is worried about putting DS1 through Uni, which is 3 years away!!.

He just worries really.

But should the roof fall in, we are sorted.
Should the car blow up, we are sorted.
Without having to resort to borrowing.

I just can't believe he has managed to do it. I think he has a s/o that goes out when he is paid, to an account he never bothers to remember, and then he checked it and surprised himself. So it shows he can save when he wants to. He has just decided to motivate himself to do it.

So, I am getting sod all done over half term as kids are everywhere. I just made them sandwiches and crackers for lunch, they ate all the crackers and I now have left over sandwiches. Grr. They might reappear as toasties later.

The bathrooms are clean and the floors washed, all beds laundered and remade.
All bedrooms tidied and hoovered. The laundry mountain is shrinking rapidly.

Bought DS4 a fan for his bedroom, he has a south facing skylight, and it is quite a small room, so it heats really quickly, which is fine, but at bedtime he complains he is hot. All the others are north facing and have openable windows, but with the rain the last couple of nights means no open skylights. So, £15 fan, (with £5 morries money off voucher) £10 Happy DS4.


The weather is rotten. DS3 and 4 have been out and spent their pocket money. Nobody wants to leave the house to traipse around in the rain. In fact the only thing that would voluntarily get me outside again today would be if I had a hound that needed walking.

So I am still filling the shelves with books and bits and bobs from the back room, into perfect order in the front room.

The main problem of that being, that with a clear floor, and reduced furniture (as it was not working where it was), I can see our hideous swirly gold brown and red carpet in all its disgraceful majesty. And no amount of hoovering can make it look any better...... It will do, however, until after the plastering and painting is over.
Then, as Shakespeare's Sister screetched 'you're History' you ugly carpet.

f0xh0les

Well, it took me 5 whole days.

I finished the stripping of wallpaper 5 days ago , and this morning, as I have no more money to do anything, I thought I would ask baby plasterer to quote next week for the living room walls.

But he was less than 2 miles away, just finishing a job, and had to drive past mine anyway, so I had a quote by 11.30, it is £200, he can do it next week, so I booked him in - the problem was, I overpaid the mortgage this morning, and have £100 a week for the next 4 weeks to feed everyone and get new white shirts for the youngest 2.

Rang DH, told him that I had accidentally booked the plasterer, told him the price, and he wants to pay for it (!!) so I am going to let him.

For 5 days I have had to put up with various sad sighs when he looks at the walls. He has been out at the pub with work 2 days this week after meetings - one he barely made it home by midnight, the other was only 8ish, or there would have been rolling of eyes and gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair as well.

So I have rescued the budget, which is so tight because I overpaid the mortgage by nearly £900 last month, and bought all the paint needed to finish most of the 'decoratey' jobs I have not finished.

So the plan for June is:

To finish all the painty jobs
To finish all the wallpaper pastey jobs
To finish all the filler-y jobs

To find a mirror for the hall

To go to the gym/ exercise at least 5 days a week.

I have loads to stuff to be doing, and all the stuff in to do it. So I need to find my motivation - my motivation is to be able to say that room is finished, and that room is finished.

So roll on June!

f0xh0les

So, according to what I have managed to work out, daily interest is £4.66
Monthly interest is around the £144.48 mark.
I need to find £144.49 to get below £106k

The fridge is full of all good things vegetable
The pantry is full of all good things carbs
The freezer is full of wraps and bread.

Need to get on with the painty jobs. Will run tomorrow morning, and start when I come back. I have spent much longer thinking about the job than it will take to do the job. This must stop.

So the jobs for tomorrow are.
1. paint the lining paper in my bedroom - it is only 2 walls.
2. Paint the shelf brackets in DS2s room - it is a 5 minute job
3. Last coat the Hall/stairs/landing white.

I should have done it over half term, but the kids were up and down the stairs so much, I caved and did other furniture moving stuff instead.

Plasterer booked for Monday and Tuesday evenings.
Which is much more exciting than it sounds!

Sent an email to a charity wood recycling initiative asking about floorboards - they said bring a bit in and we will see if we can match it. - The bay window has had woodworm at some point, and in the 80s was just fixed with wood froma diy superstore and it is so badly done, and not at all the same level as the rest of the room, it needs sorting. It is less than 1m wide x 2m long. so not even a big or expensive job. I just need the right sized boards, which apparently are no longer the 'normal size' boards. It makes me wonder why some saw mill somewhere does not just cut a load of lengths to the old spec, and then make an absolute fortune selling them to people like me who are renovating an older property.

Plus, then I can fix the floor under the shower, and get it up and running again with a new laid floor.

I am ridiculously excited to be fixing stuff on the ground floor now.

DH came home with bad news about where he works. Massively increased workload with reduced staff numbers. I am definitely on the clock on this one.

I think he has re-subscribed to the job alerts in his field.
DS1 will finish his GCSE's in 15 months
DS2 will have to start his GCSE's in 15 months
DS3 will be starting secondary school in 15 months

So that would be the ideal time, for the least academic disruption, to be heading somewhere else. This is playing on a loop inside my head.

Also housebuyingwebsite says my house is now worth £15k more than I bought it for. Which is nice. I assume it has something to do with the remortgage surveyor, as it says 99% certainty to gain this price. Will be more with working showers!

It would be nice to walk away from this place with an £80k deposit for the next one.