Cheery's country living adventure

Baileys_Babe

Pleased to hear your and Mr Cheery's news. Wishing him a full and speedy recovery.

StrawberrySuze

Good news Cheery 😊 xx

Cheery_Daff

Thank you all for your lovely comments. We are indeed very relieved (although it will take a while to sink in I think). It's all been quite an upheaval. 

Anyway, back to finances. I have two regular savers with different building societies ending today. I've logged into one - it says it will be switched to a normal savings account the next working day - so tomorrow I'll login, transfer the lot to the current account to buy Premium Bonds, and transfer the interest to the mortgage. 

The second I can't even log in! It's one of these annoying security systems where the final stage makes you request an automated phone call, and when the phone rings you have to say the security number on the screen. Except the phone isn't ringing, and no security number is appearing on the screen, and there is literally NO other way to access my account, and their phone lines are closed until tomorrow. Not impressed. Nothing I can do (although I did have a small rant on their 'anonymous web survey' that popped up) so will just have to wait until tomorrow. Apparently I chose to have annual interest paid into my main current account anyway so presumably that will happen tomorrow as well, as it's not there today. So they'll be getting a call in the morning to close the account, and I'll transfer that to premium bonds too. They won't go into the Feb draw of course, but they'll hopefully be in there in time for the March one. 

Mr Cheery's regular saver matures at the end of March, so I'll do the same with that, and then most of the savings will be all in one place by then. 

So, what else today. I want to do some normal things, which have been sadly lacking around here!! I'll come back with a list... 

Cheery_Daff

So, some things to do today

HOUSEWORK
* put washing on
* hang washing up
* tidy clothes in bathroom
* general tidy in living room

DIY
* put some more plasterboard up!

HOME IMPROVEMENTS
* find and contact two more kitchen fitter/builders
* find and contact three more heating engineers
* text other heater bloke to say not to bother (he can't do anything til July apparently - I suspect he just doesn't want to do my fiddly list of jobs!)

OUTSIDE
* clean out chickens
* tidy up all the bits of rubbish/stuff that are lying around from planned chicken run renovations which are now not going to happen
* get bags of compost from car to greenhouse
* sort out rest of pots
* do something with the seed potatoes someone gave me yesterday
* shift a couple of herbs
* generally tidy up a bit since the weather's actually not too bad for the first time this year!

Right, that'll do. Needless to say I won't get all that done, but having a list does focus the mind!

Karmacat

Here's to focussing on the normal things, that's nice and I hope there's still a few celebratory slices of cake around    Excellent to get the regular saver money somewhere as soon as the saver finishes - I'd be earning a lot more interest if I'd done that last year, oops.

Cheery_Daff

So. Some outside pottering done - cleaned out the chickens, sorted all the plastic pots, did a bit of tidying. 

Then I tried to put the washing on, and remembered we'd turned the water off on the side of the house the other day because of a suspected frozen pipe 🙄 Neither of us were willing to use the massive rickety ladder we used the other day to get into the loft (it was an emergency then, but didn't want to tempt fate... ) so we went and bought a new ladder.

Lots of faffing getting it in the car of course...

Then when I got into the loft, and turned the water back on - aarrgghh! A leak, water flowing from inside the electric water heater thing 😮😮🙄 For goodness sake. 

BIG strop from me. Having spoke to several heating engineers/plumbers already this week who all said they supposedly couldn't come out before the summer, I seemed to be facing the prospect of hand washing clothes til July 😮😮

Fortunately after a bit of a strop, we went back to the loft, and managed to isolate and bypass the water heater. It only does one side of the house, and we can manage without hot water there - we never use the shower there anyway, and fortunately the washing machine is cold water intake anyway.

So disaster averted, but one more thing on the list for the hearing engineer (if I ever find one) to deal with. YAWN.

Cheery_Daff

So a brand shiny new week! Hoping this one is going to be rather more calm and less fraught than the last few... 🙄

So what's on the cards? Work-wise, a small deadline tomorrow, and an all day course on Thursday which I'm proper excited about. 

Out of work? I've got one kitchen quote to come, and I've requested two more people to get in touch. No heating engineers on the cards so I need to ring the next couple on my list today.

Of course the end of the week is also the end of the month, so I'd like to 

* finish plasterboarding the ceiling
* start sowing some seeds
* take the Christmas tree down 😂😂 Even I can't let it get into March!! 😂😂😂

In terms of finances - two regular savers maturing - should be able to close them today and transfer to premium bonds. And I think that's it! (Famous last words...)

Karmacat

A new ladder sounds a wise investment ... but honestly, updating your house is a *lot* of work - you're doing amazingly.  Though the first sentence of your last post did sound like you'd installed a new toilet - you might just want a bit of an edit there      it's not my fault, honest, it's just that I had to read it twice    **airkisses**

Cheery_Daff

😂😂 ha, yes I spotted that just as I got back into the thread - before I saw your post 😂 edited now, no new toilet required! 😂

Some progress! Coventry have sorted their website, so I was able to login and close my account. Dosh should be transferred to main current account tomorrow. £51.59 interest already on way.

Sadly TSB website is now playing up! I could login, and see that my annual interest was £32.42, but then every time I clicked on the account name, it logged me out. Grrr. Will try again later.

So that's an extra £84.01 to go off the mortgage - might do that now for the sake of excitement 😁

Cheery_Daff

Ok, that's done, spreadsheet updated - saves us £25.94 in interest. No change to mortgage end date - but I noticed I 'only'need to overpay another £237.46 to knock another month off the end date 😁

(That's on top of the regular £580 overpayment though, so it probably won't happen for at least a couple of months, but something nice to aim for!)

And now I really MUST get to work!