Cheery's country living adventure

ElmoR

:eek:Good luck on the chimney resurrection. I once had to do that in a rented home and it clearly hadn't been swept in such a very long time, that after the sweep left, a few days later, a massive plume of soot fell out and blanketted the entire room:eek: The room was nice and warm with the fire though

Cheery_Daff

:eek: ElmoR, hope that doesn't happen!! :eek: All my books and work are in there! :eek: better than covering Mr Cheery's guitars I suppose :eek:

Gosh it's a glorious morning here :j :j still lots of snow around but glorious sunshine, very picturesque :j

It's inspiring me to have a bit of a clean :rotfl: not even a spring clean - just a simple picking the clothes off the bathroom floor, washing the dishes, taking the compost out...

....and finally taking the Christmas tree down :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

Haven't been able to do it yet cos it's jist been so gloomy and dark and I like having the twinkliness

But the sunshine has made me think it might be spring eventually :j

Ongoing mission to get stuff into the loft over the last couple of weeks - in an organised fashion, not just piles of boxes. Tree can go up there now too.

Plumber is here - not doing anything today bit reckons the expansion vessel has a leak so is going to get a new one and come back. I really like him as a bloke but my goodness he's possibly the least efficient person I've ever met :rotfl: currently drinking coffee and talking to Mr Cheery about music :rotfl:

To be fair he doesn't charge us a fortune, think he's coming to the end of his career and likes just hanging out. And apparently it's a nice day for a drive out here :rotfl: :rotfl:

Cheery_Daff

Well what a productive and cheery day this has been! :j :j

Pottered round tidying and hoovering the house (which looked filthy with the sunshine streaming in I guess this is why people did spring cleaning in the past...) Then wrapped up and spent an hour sorting the chicken run - filled their little shelters with hay, turfed all the old bedding out of the hen house and restocked it, washed and replenished all the food and water containers etc. Lovely, lovely out there, but my goodness me it was cold :eek:

Had some lunch, pottered into town for a few errands and a bimble round the charity shops, which we don't do that much these days. Didn't buy anything. Goodness it was icy! :eek: I'd almost forgotten about icy pavements :rotfl: Not got any pavements round here, and when I was in town this week there was no snow!

Had cafe-at-home today so saved ourselves a fiver I suppose...

Picked up some reduced bags of stir fry posh veg at w@itrose today - reduced to 45/60p :money: Had one for tea and it was really nice. The others are just veg (with posh mushrooms) but this one had all kinds of grains and rice in. Very tasty for 60p - but I wouldn't pay the normal £3 odd price for them! :eek:

Nowt much else to report. Oh, treated myself to some reduced-to-89p tulips too :j Love a reduced bunch of flowers - currently looking at 4 bunches of fresias I got for 13p each the other day and very nice they are too Pesky fiends charged me for 3 bunches today when I only had 2! Fortunately I noticed before I left (I've been fleeced on their reduced flowers before, with the reduction sticker not fully covering the original bar code) and they refunded my 89p. I should think so!

Nowt much else to report. Off to do YNAB to round off January. Will report back...

Cheery_Daff

YNAB sorted :j Still don't feel quite on top of things though I mean, we're not living hand to mouth but I'm still not adding anything from normal wages to the savings account, and while I try to populate February's budget at the start of the month, and leave Feb's wages for March, I find myself having to top up some categories in Feb's budget when I get paid mid-month... which suggests to me that I'm not quite there yet in terms of balancing...

Hey ho. This will get easier - if nothing else we'll no longer be spending almost £200 a month on diesel :eek: In fact in January we 'only' spent £130, and I'm hoping it'll be less than that in Feb as I'm hardly scheduled to go to the city at all (although we'll still have at least one trip a week between us, and we're going to visit Mr Cheery's family at some point too). So that might help me catch up a bit

Still, on the plus side. I have £500 saved for the car insurance, which looks like it will cover both cars :j and I have £300 saved for the house insurance - renewal quote is £330 and hoping we can switch to something a little cheaper. If we could have a month without one of the cars breaking or either of us needing a crown at the dentist that would be helpful too :eek:

Savings are now in the new PO account earning 1.5% interest :money: So that's nice No further movement on any of the other accounts as I've yet to receive card reader for NW, or account details or anything else for TSB.

We've had no post at all since last Monday :eek: The main roads are completely clear and have been for days, but there's a couple of lanes plus our drive that have been ploughed but not gritted and are quite icy. We've been getting up and down them fine, but I get why they wouldn't send the rural postie down all the little lanes. So it'll all have to wait...

Nothing else to report I don't think!

greenbee

Don't worry too much about not having everything completely under control - when you move and have lots of work to do on the house and estate you're going to struggle.

I've been here 5 years, and am still working on the place. When I'm not getting work done I save loads. But now I'm back to getting things done I'm struggling to budget - to the extent that I know my quarterly bonus was paid in Jan, but because I've been locked out of payroll (along with a number of other colleagues, so I suspect it's not something I've done) I daren't transfer what I think is bonus to my savings as I know I'll be spending a lot more for the next few weeks.

Sadly the cost of getting all the odd jobs done isn't going to be offset by what I save as a result of the huge amount of work travel I have coming up. But it might help build up the savings towards the next big project

rtandon27

Cheery_Daff wrote: »

YNAB sorted :j Still don't feel quite on top of things though I mean, we're not living hand to mouth but I'm still not adding anything from normal wages to the savings account, and while I try to populate February's budget at the start of the month, and leave Feb's wages for March, I find myself having to top up some categories in Feb's budget when I get paid mid-month... which suggests to me that I'm not quite there yet in terms of balancing... ...

...but the important thing is that you are on top of the budgeting and know where you stand! Gives you food for thought & a plan to reorganize down the line:D

Can I ask you a random YNAB budgeting question Cheery? Do you keep a separate category for work expenses that you are getting refunded? I ask because having had to fork out several thousand on a credit card which showed up in January but will be reimbursed in February - will net zero but in the meantime it makes my travelling expenses look very skewed! I do like a tidy end of month roundup & January is very messy at the moment! What do you think is the best way to approach this?

Cheery_Daff

I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask For a start I'm not particularly diligent about end of month tidying up... Was just tonight thinking i should probably do something about the messy state of Jan...

I do have a category for work expenses though. In the old version you used to be able to carry it over to the following month but can't now - I don't know what their official way of doing it is? I rarely have more than about thirty quid a month most of the time so just fill it from somewhere else temporarily it leave it sitting red - not ideal but I never THAT close to the end of the bank account...

So sorry - I'm not sure that's helpful! Have you looked at their blog/forum? I'd be interested to know - I'm offer to a couple of conferences soon so might need to do something similar!

Cheery_Daff

And thanks for your reassurance green bee good to know I'm not the only one I tend to take house project spends out of savings which only makes me feel like things are being depleted even more

But hopefully we'll claw something back on the diesel at least. May have spoken too soon though - my laptop has been behaving oddly and Mr Cheery thinks it may be on the blink... :eek:

Sigh.

gallygirl

How terribly grown up you sound with all this banking and budgeting stuff Cheery :T.

Cheery_Daff

:rotfl: :rotfl:

Well I will be 40 next year so it's about time really :eek: :rotfl: