Cheery's country living adventure

Fortune_Smiles

I'm so glad to hear that the central heating is up and running Cheery.  That and the new kitchen are going to make life so much easier and pleasant for you both.  Particularly now the weather is worsening.

Fortune x

Cheery_Daff

Certainly will! 

Central heating is current disconnected again while they drain all the water out of the system so they can connect the new radiators. Won't be done before we leave for the vets, but should be done by the time we get back. Fingers crossed - I think after that journey we'll be in need of a cosy night in with a stiff gin...

Cheery_Daff

OK, looking at a few other categories for Uber Frugal Month. 

DIESEL
2021 average diesel spend is £141 a month. Really odd year, with obviously no commuting til the last 3 weeks or so, but we've still done quite a bit of driving with one thing and another. I looked back at 2019 as a comparison, which was £157 a month, so we're probably not too far off.  

At the minute we're making NO attempt to combine/reduce trips - Mr Cheery is getting out of the way of the builders every day, and sometimes we end up going into town 3 times in the space of a day, with a round trip of about 15 miles each time. Ridiculous, but I'm not going to impose any restrictions until the builders are gone. After that though, we can start at least trying to combine a few trips here and there. I'm still not travelling to work much so that helps too. 

We'll keep the budget at £150 a month for now and see how we get on. 

FOOD & HOUSEHOLD
This is just food and little household stuff you'd buy in a supermarket (not appliances or anything). 

2021 monthly average = £336
2020 monthly average = £366
2019 monthly average = £218

Obviously things were very odd last year, and it's unlikely we'll get back down to 2019 levels, but this is definitely one of the main areas of focus for November's challenge. 

rtandon27

Cheery_Daff said:

...Obviously things were very odd last year, and it's unlikely we'll get back down to 2019 levels, but this is definitely one of the main areas of focus for November's challenge. 

Cheery - our experience on the Food/Household front is that once the kitchen was sorted into a usable space, our expenses in this category plummeted.  Our meal-planning and cook from the stores options are more in hand & once everything was in it's proper place in the cupboards, we discovered that we have a lifetime supply of dusters/sponges/dettol/washing up liquid etc. which I won't be spending on for the foreseeable future!  A working kitchen & storage cupboards makes a HUGE difference, so I'm sure you'll find yourselves getting a handle on this category fairly easily! - RT

Cheery_Daff

Thanks RT - that's definitely what we're hoping, although it's looking like that will be more December than November now 🙄

Just waiting outside the vets... 🙄

Cheery_Daff

Right, home again, finally! Bonnie seems fine, touch wood, and is off her medicine thank goodness.

Rusty is NOT fine, but they still can't find anything specific wrong with her 🙄 It wasn't our usual vet, rather vexingly 🙄 but our second favourite was in reception, and while she didn't see Rusty, we did talk through all the symptoms and options so I'm happier now we've done that. She's got a week of steroids 🙄 to see if that perks her up enough to eat more, which might generally make her feel better, and she's going back again next Friday to see the second favourite vet (who is actually Mr Cheery's favourite vet anyway). Might give her an x-ray next week to see if they can spot anything else.

In more cheerful news, THE HOUSE IS WARM!!!!! It was SO exciting walking through the new kitchen - it has literally NEVER been warm since we moved in, it's always been basically walking through a fridge to go to bed, but it's WARM!! 😁😁😁

Just as the plumber was leaving, I spotted the boiler pressure as up to 3.5... he thinks he's found the issue and fixed it, but we still need to keep an eye on it over the weekend. 

We're going to have it serviced anyway, it's not been done for a couple of years, and that plumber is pipes only, not gas (and certainly not LPG), so we need to find a different one 🙄 YAWN. Had one recommendation so will try him next week.

Tonight though, I'm going o make a nice easy tea then spend the evening on the sofa luxuriating in being WARM 😁😁😁

beanielou

Enjoy being WARM     

Fortune_Smiles

Enjoy being lovely and toasty 🔥

Fortune x

Cheery_Daff

YAWN - Mr Cheery has realised that the plumber has left one of the main hot water pipes in the loft propped up on top of a couple of precarious bits of wood and a bit of MDF. Plumber is pretty fastidious, so to me this is clearly just something he forgot to come back to as they ended up leaving really late. Builder is here on Monday, so as long as we don't knock it all over in the meantime, he can sort it out then. But still, YAWN. 

Anyway, let's think about finances instead, far more cheerful (unless we think about builder-related finances, but I'm not going to do that just yet...). 

TREATS BUDGET
This is joint treats, cafe trips etc, not us each spending on ourselves. 

2019 average monthly spend = £135
2020 average monthly spend = £97 (impressed we even managed this! But we did have a lot of takeaway cups of tea when walking around)
2021 average monthly spend = £186

Hmm - clearly that can be reigned in considerably. We barely spent anything Jan-April this year, then went a bit mad in May with £354 (although some of that might have been just me doing a YNAB catch up from April). Every month since has been over £220 though. That's mostly cafes, although does include the (very) occasional meal out that we have together. 

MY SPENDS
Hmm... 

This includes a random assortment of books, clothes, going out for lunch (just me with a friend, not Mr Cheery), gym membership, races, magazine subscriptions, and counselling, which I was going to separate, but the budget was set up differently in 2019 so I've lumped everything in together for comparison. 

2019 average per month = £197
2020 average per month = £287 (but this includes a massive £789 in March, where I must have paid for something specific like a course or something - can't remember what though!)
2021 average per month = £224

This year I've broken it down more rather than lumping it all in together, so I can tell you monthly averages more specifically for 2021: 

£6.21 - socialising (clearly I don't get out much )
£5.29 stationery
£18.75 books
£46.67 clothes (what?! I'd happily tell you I never buy clothes but that's clearly not true! I know I've had a new swimming costume, and a couple of bras, and a couple of pairs of boots...)
£22.90 exercise (which I actually think might include a couple of new sports bras)
£78 counselling (had a few months off in the middle of the year, back again now, but hopefully will be able to stop at some point!)
£47.01 'other things' (other random stuff that is just for me, that I should clearly itemise more carefully...)

Obviously some work to be done here... 

Cheery_Daff

CHICKENS
NOT our cheapest item, but one we won't be skimping on. I'm including it out of interest... 

2019 average per month =  £36.77 (a relatively uncomplicated year - two chickens killed by a stoat, three new chickens, but no major building work or vets bills)
2020 = £127.97 (two elderly chickens died after various illnesses, then two others had hormonal implants, and we got 3 new young ones)
2021 = £288.75 (one chicken with a tumour, replacement implants for two, plus a new implant for a third (who then sadly died anyway, plus building a large extension to the run). 

Again, I've separated it more this year: 

£27.84 food, treats and bedding 
£70.51 building project - not entirely convinced this is right - a total of over £700?? £300 each in May and June?! We did buy some timber, and some netting, but I fear there may have been a bit of mis-accounting somewhere... [Edit: yes, it seems I've counted timber for the outer run - which we've not even built yet - twice, and that was £259. I hope that didn't actually get taken out of the bank account twice!! Means my accounting is wrong somewhere else, but I'm not raking back through the whole year now...]
£190.40 vets. Good grief. I completely get why people do NOT make the decisions we tend to at the vets (and there's part of me that wishes we just stuck to the local vet, who knows little about chickens and just does antibiotics and hopes for the best...)

That's a total of £1904 in vets bills just in 2021. Could have added that to the kitchen fund!! (Wouldn't be without the little pesky creatures though...)