Cheery's country living adventure

edwink

I am pleased for you Cheery that you are happy with your builders. It makes such a difference when your home is being disrupted by having major work carried out and having workers boots traipsing through your home

I am sure your hens will be very happy in their newly made large play area. You will be surprised that they adapt pretty well to changes once they have fully settled in with you. They will certainly miss popping indoors though, in the warm, to climb all over on Mr Cheery on the sofa :rotfl: Hope he is feeling much better soon and glad you are much better now yourself after the rotten week you had feeling so unwell

I do love your thread Cheery as it is so inspiring. You are a little grafter that's for sure. Keep up the good work :dance:

Edwink x

armandsyeed

Have some fun by exploring :beer:

themadvix

Oh, it's so exciting when you get the professionals in and things happen at lightning speeds - so glad you're finally getting a proper kitchen and the hole in the ceiling sorted! (I have got that right, haven't I? Hole is going?)

Cheery_Daff

Hole is indeed going, and we will have two upstairs rooms with sturdy floors we can actually walk on :j :j and we'll have two extra windows which will be LOVELY :j

But they're not putting the kitchen back together - that"s for us to do once they've gone :eek:

Cheery_Daff

Morning MSE chums :hello:

So, building work is continuing apace. Ceilings above kitchen and dining area are out now, and with no wall in the middle, it's all one giant two storey space, which I have to say I LOVE :rotfl: Not exactly MSE at the minute though as they had to leave the upstairs lights on - and now of course the light pulls are dangling 15 foot in the air and nobody can reach to turn them off :rotfl: :rotfl:

Ah well. They'll be on all weekend now, as I think the joists and floorboards aren't going back in til early next week :eek:

Amused myself last night - got home and they'd laid the first layer of concrete on the bit of the floor the chimney came out of. One of them had written 'Mark smells' in the concrete :rotfl: :rotfl:

The concrete was still wet so I grabbed a stick and it now says 'Mark smells nice' :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: Made me laugh :rotfl: :rotfl:

Hope he doesn't think I fancy him though :eek: :rotfl: :rotfl: rotfl: :rotfl:

Anyway, in other news I had a 'wellness check' at work yesterday :eek: Mainly because it gets me a hefty discount on gym membership - meaning annual membership is £135 instead of £180, so just over £11 a month :money:

So I've signed up, and been to a spin class first thing this morning :eek: There was only me there :eek: :rotfl: until 3 other people turned up (10 mins into a 30 min class :rotfl: ) Still, over and done with and I'm just waiting to stop sweating before I get dressed

Cheery_Daff

Morning MSE chums :hello: Another new week and we are rocketing towards next year at a frightening pace :eek: :eek:

Mr Cheery has gone to visit his dad today, so I am here 'supervising' the builders (well, listening to them banging, and wishing I'd stolen a couple of chocolate biscuits from the packet before I handed them over :rotfl: :rotfl: )

Nothing much to report here. MB continues, although I'm not having the world's most lucrative few days - still up £333 for the month so far though :money: Considering I only mad £352 in the whole of September this isn't too bad :rotfl: I did want to get up to £500 this month, if not £600, though so need to pull my finger out.

Looks like the building work will be slightly more expensive than quoted - but not more than we secretly anticipated. There are a couple of bricked up windows which we're having turned into actual windows :j and the lintels over those are fine - but in the process of taking the joists out, they've discovered that the lintels over the existing windows are rotten and when the Building Regs man came the other day he said they needed to be replaced. Yawn.

We've also had to remove an internal wall that had a door in. We were going to replace the door with a bi-fold one (to give us a bit of space while still meeting building regs), but now it's down, we quite like it without the wall :rotfl: Which is fine - except it does mean replacing a couple of upstairs windows with ones we can escape out of. So that adds a bit of expense too (but not too much, given that the alternative was rebuilding the downstairs wall and fitting a bifold door).

Also means we might have the builders here for a couple of extra days.

So our guess is we're probably looking at another £2000, on top of the original £5100. Tedious, but this is why we didn't go right up to our limit (and also why they're only doing the bits we can't do, rather than all of it!)

Mr Cheery did clear all the excess stone and rubbish etc over the weekend so hopefully that will have saved them an hour or two and gives them less to fall over this morning :rotfl:

Sun is shining, and I am sat in the living room with a laptop on my knee and very much missing my desk in my study :rotfl: :rotfl:

Washing is on - I suppose I might even be able to hang it outside for a few hours! :j But it probably won't dry as it's cold and not very breezy. Thought I'd stick it all on the radiators while Mr Cheery isn't here :rotfl:

Right, best get on with some work I suppose!

lindez

Looks like it is all going to plan Cheery apart from the added extra's it will look lovely when it is all completed and you have two floors to walk on the house will appear huge.

Fortune_Smiles

It's going to be fabulous Cheery. Can't wait to hear about the finished article.

Fortune x

Cheery_Daff

Evening chums :hello:

We left at lunchtime yesterday, and stayed with friends overnight, and when I got back this evening we've got a floor upstairs :j :j Not a whole floor :rotfl: but the joists are in over the whole lot, and 75% of the floor boards are on, and the rest will be finished tomorrow :j Very exciting :j

Tomorrow is their last day, and while they reckon they'll get it all done I remain unconvinced Still got to get the floorboards on, fit two new windows, concrete a hole in the floor (which they'll probably do just as they leave), and finish bricking up the chimney. But there are three of them I suppose so perhaps they will get it done...

They're going to have to come back to sort out the lintels above the old windows, and to fit new escape route windows upstairs, but that'll likely be another few weeks :eek:

And of course there are a million things for us to do once they've gone :eek: Need to completely rebuild the kitchen itself of course, and completely plaster upstairs and downstairs, and and and...

Still, we are up to the task, even though it might well take us months... :eek:

So builder will likely cost
£5100 original quote
£800 extra windows
£500 new lintels
= £6400

Also the little car is definitely on its last legs... Started to feel like it's not accellarating as much as it used to now - it's done this before and had various bits of work done, but I'm not doing anything major to it now.

Once the builders are out, next immediate job (before all the DIY) is to find a new car.

And the boiler is playing up too... Doesn't turn off when you turn the thermostat off, and sometimes doesn't turn back on again without an elaborate dance of button pressing and switch turning, and today it showed a fault code that seemed to suggest there was something wrong with the fan (but after a bit more button pressing it went away and the heating is now on again).

Sigh.

Still, I've got the evening to myself tonight so I'm off to try to appease the MB gods and build the stash a bit :money:

Cheery_Daff

Well, fat lot of good my evening of MB did me - I'm at £302 for the month now when I was at £333 last week :eek: Couple of free bets to come in over the next couple of days, but I've mostly been doing casino offers lately and there's always a bit of a risk of going downwards as well as up...

But I only do low risk stuff, so no chance of much of a downswing, and I have to remember that it's still over £300 extra this month :j

Anyway, builders have gone - but will be back at the end of next week to fit a couple of lintels. They've also left the cement mixer (!) as they ran out of cement right at the end so there's still a bit of a hole they need to fill in in the floor :eek: Must remember to jump over the bit they HAVE done tonight and not stand in it in my slippers :eek: :rotfl: :rotfl:

Mr Cheery is on his way back, and I would love to have tidied the living room and hoovered but, well, I have spent the day utterly exhausted and mostly just lying on the sofa, but not sleeping I've never got into a routine of sleeping well when I'm in a house on my own, mostly cos I just do it so very rarely Always end up fitfully dozing on the sofa in front of the tv rather than going to bed like a normal person

Hey ho, hopefully will sleep well tonight and can assess what still needs doing in the morning :j