Confessions of a house hoarder

cazmanian_minx

1st March and I've done all my invoicing, so it's time for some scores on the doors.

Mr RPC - £350.20
NEL - £114.00
Journalist #3 - £160.00

Typing subtotal - £624.20

Matched betting - £645.17
eBay sales - £89.45 but that doesn't take eBay fees and P&P into account, so call it about £60.00

Other subtotal - £705.17

TOTAL - £1,329.37

On the face of it, not too bad, but given I'm not taking any money out of the matched betting at the moment, I need to get some more typing and selling done in March.

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday is that I've been a bit naughty and booked myself a ticket to go and see Erasure play in Glasgow in May. I've been a fan for getting on for 30 years and haven't seen them live for about 10 years - I really couldn't afford to go to the Violet Flame tour and thought I'd miss them this time because their main tour this year is as the support act to Robbie Williams and (a) the tickets were about £100 and (b) I'm not mad keen on Robbie, but then they announced three warm-up solo gigs and with the tickets at £35 + booking fee, it seemed rude not to

Ordinarily I'd have gone down to London to see them, because nothing beats standing on an escalator packed full of Erasure fans all singing A Little Respect going down into the Tube on the way home from the gig, but it's on Bank Holiday Monday and flights and accommodation would have been pricey, so Glasgow it is and they're doing a full solo tour next year when hopefully I'll be able to get down to London to see them again.

Knit_Witch

Love me a bit of Erasure - Dr Witch and I often have "The Best Of" playing whilst travelling and a singalong occurs!

cazmanian_minx

I took on a file for Large Agency last night. First one in a while and on a short deadline, so I was still typing, somewhat cross-eyed, at 11.30 last night. So today really wasn't the best day for Jack (7-month-old Border collie) to nick my wallet off the coffee table while I was out feeding the sheep and chew both corners off it. Okay, my fault for forgetting I'd left it there, but it was the one really good-quality accessory I owned and even if the manufacturer still made them in that style, which they don't, I can't justify spending £60 on a replacement. Even worse, I thought he looked settled enough when I nipped out to the post office (he was happily chewing his antler), so didn't crate him. I came back to find the hearthrug folded in half, a roll of baking paper unrolled around the floor, a box of matches half-chewed, the little model of a springer spaniel given to us by our first rescue dog's foster family on the floor (luckily unbroken) and a photo of my father on the floor with the glass smashed and the wooden frame chewed to bits

He's finished teething, so I'm not sure whether it's separation anxiety or boredom or a bit of both - he's absolutely fine overnight, doesn't touch a thing, and he's usually fine when I go to feed the sheep or nip out to the post office, but today was obviously one of those days. I crated him when I went to feed the sheep this evening (the weather was so vile that there was no point in taking him with me, he wouldn't have heard me over the wind and rain) and he protested loudly, but if he can't confine himself to playing with his own toys, of which he has many, then that's how it's going to have to be for now.

One big spend today, a Bosch PRR 250, which is a specialist sanding tool with all sorts of little attachments that will help me get into the curves on the bannisters and the nooks and crannies in the doors down the road. I'm using a multitool thing with a sander attachment at the moment, but it uses the velcro system to attach the sanding sheets and after about 15 minutes they refuse to stick any more. I've seen this Bosch selling for up to £110 at the big DIY sheds, so was delighted to find it on special offer from an Amazon Marketplace seller for £69.99. That's covered by what it would have cost me to take the doors I'm going to sand down to the nearest place that does dipping (about 100 mile round trip) and pay for them to be chemically stripped, so I reckon that's broken even on the budget

EatingTheElephant

I'm so glad I found your new diary, I remember following your old diary on here.

Animals always seem to know when you are tired/stressed and need them to not play up. Then invariably do I find! I hope you have a better day today.

cazmanian_minx

A busy weekend. Saturday was posting out eBay orders, laundry and lots of typing. Sunday was ironing (ours and mother-in-law's, who has finally been persuaded to let me help her out a bit, aged 90), more typing and moving the sheep to a new field, which we were a bit apprehensive about because being in a common grazings area, it's quite easy either to lose some of yours en route or pick up some of somebody else's. We'd planned to go out the back of the fields they were in, through the corner gap, which is a small gap between the corners of two fields that sheep hop through all the time, which would funnel us onto the track down to our field on the point. It would have worked beautifully if Bella, our lead sheep, hadn't been quite so hefty (she's not had a lamb in several years and is rather plumper than your average hill sheep as a result!) - she didn't fit through the gap and nearly got wedged. We ended up going the long way round and they all followed the bucket of sheep nuts beautifully, so Jack wasn't needed, much to his annoyance (He was with us, but on his lead, as he was feeling a bit onward bound and wanted the sheep to go faster than we wanted them to).

Mortgage payment out today and I've already boiled the frog up another £10, so next month's payment will be £300. The minimum we have to pay each month is £163.08 and February's interest, thanks to a short month and a large chunk of cash going into the offset, was £107.54. If I can keep the offset balance more or less where it is now, then next month's interest should be under £100 :j:j:j

EssexHebridean

All going well aside from chewed wallets and other pup-related upheaval then.

That sander sounds like a really useful find and one that you're definitely going to get your moneys worth from - well done for spotting it at the right price and pouncing! :T

cazmanian_minx

Spendy day I thought I'd better get some accommodation sorted out for the Erasure gig, given it's a bank holiday weekend, but all the places like Travelodge, which would normally be around £60 for the night, were well over £100. So I had a look on Airbnb and found a room in a flat, four minutes' walk from the venue, lots of positive reviews, for £52. Travel is now causing me a headache. I suspect there are engineering works on, because I'm only getting one option for coming back on the Sunday and it gives me precisely 12 minutes to change trains at Inverness - if I miss the connection I'm stuck overnight. I don't fancy driving 6 hours to Glasgow in the bone-shaking truck (and it would be a full tank of diesel each way) and renting a car for the weekend would be over £100 plus fuel. It looks like my best option is going to be to drive the truck down to Inverness and then get the Megabus to Glasgow - it should be about £15 each way if I manage to grab tickets soon after they come on sale.

Also bought a John Lewis voucher for my sister-in-law's birthday present and got cash out to pay the farrier tomorrow. I thought that was it for a while until this evening, when the invoice for all the fencing work turned up. Now, I knew that it was £6.40 a metre and we were doing around 440m, plus £40 per strainer or more if they had to go through rock, which 7 of them did, so I was expecting something in the region of about £3,500.

Wrong

First off, I hadn't realised that the price didn't include VAT, so that was another 20% on top. Secondly, we'd suffered from a bit of project creep, they'd fitted three gates for us (supplying one of them) and put a drain in down the side of the house. Total bill? £4,975 :eek::eek::eek::eek:

If anyone wants me, I'll be over in this corner typing madly - fortunately I currently have 6 files from NEL (one done), two from Journalist #3 and a ping from Journalist #1 to say she's probably got some stuff for me (which I'm pleased about because she does mainly celebrity interviews and they're always fun )

Knit_Witch

Eeeep! :eek::eek::eek::eek: good luck with all of that (crosses eyes at the fence bill)

EssexHebridean

Ouch - get those fingers fluttering!

We've had it a few times travelling up when the train *into* Inverness and the train onwards turn out to be one and the same - could it feasibly be that is the case with your 12min connection?

cazmanian_minx

EssexHebridean wrote: »

Ouch - get those fingers fluttering!

We've had it a few times travelling up when the train *into* Inverness and the train onwards turn out to be one and the same - could it feasibly be that is the case with your 12min connection?

It could be, but I'd rather not take the risk! Plus the Megabus is nearly £50 cheaper and I'll get home faster

I was planning to have an early supper, play a bit of Assassin's Creed and then be in bed by nine tonight, but Large Agency put out a shout for a 28-minute reformatting job, I stuck my hand up and got assigned it. I like doing these, it's basically correcting a transcript they don't feel is quite up to scratch, so most of the hard work of typing it is done, but you get paid 60% of the full rate for doing it.

So I did that, then thought I might as well finish off the 10 minutes I had left of NEL's third file while my supper defrosted a bit more, and now I've eaten WAY too much this evening (all healthy - homemade curried parsnip soup followed by a chicken stir fry, no noodles) and so I have to wait until my stomach has deflated enough to let me do 10 minutes of yoga before bed.

I'm not the only one with stomach issues this evening. A very kind neighbour gave me a big sack of neeps for the horses, which are sitting by the gate so I can pick a couple up when I go to feed the boys each day. Jura, my cocker spaniel, has been happily gnawing one in the garden for the past couple of days with no ill effects. Today Jack decided to give it a go. Put it this way, if you hear a loud explosion from the north, it probably means a spark from the woodburner has ignited all the methane gas in here - he's quite flatulent anyway, but this has sent him into overdrive!!

I've been shuffling some money around today - enough cash is on its way from the mortgage offset to the business account to pay the fencing bill, and £50 went off to one of the credit cards, so that's now a whole 0.05% of the holiday let paid off :rotfl:

Time for some Assassin's Creed, I think, and I'll try not to do what I did last night, which was think, 'I'll just play for 20 minutes or so,' at 9pm and then suddenly find it was gone 11...