Cherry takes the reins

Cherryfudge

I had a good night's sleep a last night so why am I tired? DH is too. Maybe we're still recovering from our holiday!

A slightly strange day: I meant to finish my holiday diary and haven't touched it. I meant to tidy up the last bits of unpacking, and I haven't touched them either. I meant to work on the application for a new bank account and never got round to it.

I thought car boots were finished for the year but they aren't, so we went to have a look around and it was one of those days where a couple of well-heeled women the same size as me were having a clear out! I did very well . Four items of clothing, all 'good' brands, for £6, including a really nice dress. The only downside was I discovered some beads are missing off some sandals I bought but as they were 50p, I'm not too worried. I also managed not to buy some very nice boots because they were a bit tight - so the self-control is still in here somewhere.

Another 50p went on a bag of cooking apples which I'll combine with the last of our blackberries to make crumble for Sunday lunch.

I returned the piece of clothing I'd bought yesterday and got a refund as I'd bought the wrong size - that exactly equals today's clothes spend so in one sense I've not spent any more.

The weather was far too nice to stay in so I did some tidying up in the garden (saw a hedgehog out there this evening) and loads of washing, then got some ironing done while Strictly was on. DS2 gave me back some money he'd borrowed and as a joke I ran the iron over it, completely forgetting you can't do that with modern notes! I now have a warped tenner to take to the bank, and DS2 is telling me I've committed treason by defacing the Queen's likeness!

DS reappeared downstairs to tell us the house is developing cracks so I went to see what it was all about and, rather alarmingly, he's right. A load-bearing wall in the centre of the house has new hairline cracks from the ceiling down several feet and over the door! There are very old cracks in that room which was put down to ancient subsidence when we bought the house about a quarter of a century ago, but this is definitely something we haven't seen before. I've told myself houses don't usually fall down just like that and I don't know of any mining in this area (nor do we live on a cliff edge), but we are wondering whether to get a builder or surveyor in. Not this time of night, though. They could have been there months and only just been noticed, especially as there could be movement caused by all the rain last winter followed by a long hot summer.

So it's mostly been a positive day, apart from the cracks.

Spends:
Clothes £6
Housekeeping £0.50
MS:
Refund £6 (clothes)
Cheap apples and free blackberries
Decluttering:
Progress on the garden - though I need to refill the wall baskets, they are looking very twiggy.

Onebrokelady

Welcome back Cherry,I'm glad you enjoyed your holiday.I too have some alarming cracks in one of my outside walls,but it's only on the inside of the outside wall under the window ledge down to the floor,it's in a bedroom and the crack doesn't carry on in the room below so I hoping it's not too serious,we had the house surveyed when we bought it and no subsidence was found,the garden path has moved quite a lot since I've lived here though but I've been told that's because of the clay soil and natural movement due to weather changes

Honeysucklelou2

Have you got any houses being built in the vicinity? We had a couple if cracks appear in our house but only after a building company over the road had been putting in some kind of heating system that required a fair amount if drilling. When they were doing it , the house felt as if it were vibrating but no more have appeared since.

Had to smile at the ironing of the money!

Cherryfudge

Well, we are on a slope and an estate was build behind us a few years ago, so it may possibly have affected the house: we do notice more water on the lawn as it can't drain away where the new houses are. DS reckons we have too much in the loft, and I'm wondering if it was my dramatic fall, just the other side of that wall - 10 stone descending at speed might just have shaken the brickwork!

Today has been an NSD. I checked the mortgage account and one of the overpayments is now showing against the mortgage so I know we will have a little less interest to pay next month. I have also collected together most of the foreign currency we had left over so it's ready to change back, but I don't like to go on a Monday as the Post Office queues are always longer.

I think DH has taken my reduction of hours as inspiration: he is actively wondering about going part-time! When he mentioned it I suggested trying to live off half his wages for a while to see how it would work out. This could be interesting.

When we finally settle Mum's estate, there should be enough left to pay off the rest of our mortgage and put some money in my pension, so I'm thinking that once that's happened we would have enough for everyday needs but not much for extras and emergencies. We have some savings but nothing spectacular. It's fairly early days yet, and some of our main responsibilities are situations that can't last forever, meaning that stresses we live with at the moment may go away and leave us with more capacity to deal with work. I don't know if DH could go back to full time if he left it. I could certainly find more hours but I'm learning the hard way that my job requires strength and physical fitness so I can't rely on being able to work at any given point in the future...

So, nothing to add to the spending totals today, and the only MS thing I can think off was taking the trim off a jumper that was too 'fussy' for me, to try to give it a new lease of life.

Went for a run, though. Not a long one but glad I went.

Cherryfudge

DH's birthday is coming up very soon so I have been doing some present buying. The other day it was £24.90 for his main present from me, today I've got him a card, forgot to get wrapping paper and somehow managed to organise presents from a couple of other people. I also had lunch with DD which was good as we haven't seen each other for ages.

I can highly recommend the article somewhere on this site (link through the email) about clearing space on your phone, by the way. I thought I was doing all I could till I went through the checklist this morning and got back about a third of the meagre allocation the manufacturers gave me. It seems to have speeded it up too.

02/10/18 Spends:
Housekeeping £14.56
Gift £2.00
Today Spends:
Housekeeping £9.77
Gifts £5.09
MS:
DD's delicious homemade soup for lunch. She's given me the recipe.
Decluttering:
Assorted papers have gone... not made a huge dent in the clutter though.
Bag of summer clothes packed up ready for the winter.

HairyHandofDartmoor

I hope the cracks in your wall won't turn out to be anything serious.

Working part time would certainly be less stresssful if your budget can stand it.

Cherryfudge

Thanks, Hairy. I hope so too! The more I think about it though, the more likely I think it is they are related to my accident. They are just the other side of where I landed with a considerable thump! I'm not going to repeat the exercise to test the theory, though.

My manager checked with me today that I really do want to reduce my hours. Yes, I do. I had lots of time to think about it while off sick, but it really was one of those 'while in the doctor's waiting room' moments. I just knew life was getting a bit like a game of Space Invaders (for those who remember these things). You can only dodge the perils for so long: eventually something will catch you. You can only win for sure by changing the playing conditions (Captain Kirk/Kobayashi Maru scenario ): in my case that means taking on less and not thinking I can go on being invincible.

That said, I found myself pushing boundaries again today. I had done the prep for DH's birthday (tomorrow), on Wednesday, apart from food shopping. We're very limited for food storage at the moment so I did the food today and ended up with far too much to carry. Only DS2 was around to help and it was nearly time to go to work so I rang him for a lift but he was in the bath! He did mention, though, that he'd just heard that DH's Dad had had a fall. I rang DH who was an hour's drive away and had already sorted for DS1 to assist. It all worked out and I think he came to no harm but I ended up carrying the shopping home, stopping from time to time to give my arms a break (pun unintended) - thankfully and amazingly the damaged one seems to have held up really well, much more than I would have expected.

Apart from that, I've been at work and put in an extra half hour, meaning I can leave a bit earlier tomorrow as 'everyone' is coming to tea. Then DD and DS2 have offered to cook and to make the cake!

I think I'd better get to bed soon...
Spends:
Gift wrap £1.97
Entertaining £17.54
Housekeeping £2.39
MS:
Shopped around for wrapping paper and saved a pound or so
Realised the 'birthday' food isn't 'housekeeping' but 'entertaining', which is handy as it makes the budget balance a lot more easily, and kind of gives us a free meal... doesn't it?
£2 coin into £2 savings
10th coin savings £1.02

Cherryfudge

A couple of NSDs.

DH and I are trying to choose a stove and spent time this morning trawling websites and comparing pictures but haven't made a decision. The more we find out, the more we realise we don't know. We both prefer modern to traditional, but as we have an older house, would that look wrong? I can see advantages to a convector stove but the room is quite small: would it always be too hot? Is it worth spending more when we don't currently light the fire all that often? Would we light it more if we had a stove?

We did get a nice piece of post: the mortgage people sent a letter to say we have paid off another component of the mortgage and reduced our monthly payments by about a quarter! We're going to go on overpaying though: loving the snowball effect .

Nothing much to report on the spending front: DH got me a couple of ready meals as I'm working unsocial hours this weekend, so that's a bit more of a spend than usual but we had extra money in the budget as his birthday food came under 'entertainment'. His birthday was really nice: all the kids and their other halves and Grandpa came round, J cooked the meal and DS2 made the cake so I wasn't too frantically busy for once. The washing machine has been working massive overtime: there are effectively four households with our surname in this town and it's now washing for all of them! Granted, all are related to us and we did buy a big machine a few years ago to accommodate all the washing produced by three teens. Now Grandpa can't manage to carry his washing any more so we're just adding it to the general accumulation. The couples do their own but at the moment none of them has a machine. We could do with the sunny weather again to dry it all so there's a bit of extra expense finishing off the line drying in the dryer as we've run short of indoor places to hang it!

Oh, and DH and I are both starting to think 'next holiday'...

Treadingonplaymobil

My parents moved from an open fire to a stove a decade or so ago, and they use the stove so much more than the fire. It's less hassle, less smokey, easier to light and can burn away with just a low glow for much longer than the fire could. Although I read somewhere that stoves and wood are going to get much more expensive because the government wants to disincentivise people from having them? I didn't pay much attention though because we don't have one.

I am a huge believer in working part time - I was talking to a friend about it just last week who is very frugal, and she was saying that the time she has for saving money, never mind for her own headspace since going part time has more than made up for the drop in income. Not being so exhausted, so being able to batch cook cheaper food etc, search for cheaper deals for things. I know you're already great at MS so might not feel so many benefits, but she was also fairly frugal and still noticed a difference. My mental health falls off a cliff when I try to work too many hours.

Cherryfudge

Thanks TOPM, both these points are reassuring! At the moment we have a supply of wood from two gardens with big trees, though of course that wouldn't last forever. I'm thinking of a multi-fuel stove though, so we could use smokeless fuel too. It would also have a passive role: stopping the draught from the chimney!
I'm excited to know your friend has found real savings from having time to do things herself. The exhaustion has been my main motivator, but I know I could save money by cooking from scratch. I love cooking but mostly do it at work! Meanwhile DH lives off salmon (as far as I can make out, with the occasional foray into trout ) which isn't the cheapest way to cater but he doesn't enjoy trying new recipes. You are so right, too, about the effect of overwork on mental health. When I'm tired I'm much less happy and probably don't think as well.

Today: another NSD but I have most of tomorrow off and will undoubtedly spend as I'm going out with friends for a walk and lunch. I will report back.