Cheery's country living adventure

Cheery_Daff

Aw, bless you all :kisses3:

Sorry to bring a tear to your eye edwink I confess there was a tear or two in mine too

As you'll know from the hens thread I stayed out to supervised bedtime, and got up before dawn to supervise breakfast :rotfl:

New ladies settling in nicely, just scoffing their breakfast and listening to the dawn chorus with their heads on one side.

Elder ladies patrolling the borders & demonstrating who's boss.

Mr Cheery has fortified the fence and gone back to bed :rotfl:

I'm drinking my tea and watching the sun rise (they have a great view from in here).

Three eggs, although one of them had such a soft shell it was broken before it got out of the hen house. Lovely to be back on the brink of having so many eggs I don't know what to do with them though :j :j :j

Karmacat

Utterly wonderful, Cheery, I love the idea of the new ladies scoffing and the elder ones patrolling

themadvix

Sounds lovely Cheery - what a rural idyll (without the stoat). I bet your new ladies think they've died and gone to heaven - such a difference from what they're used to.

Cheery_Daff

I'm sure the new ladies are having a great time - well they were til two of them jumped the fence while I was sitting here and ended up in a fight with Mildred and Maud :eek: fortunately i was on hand to intervene...

They're all in bed now and I've not heard a peep for the last ten minutes so think I'm going to venture back inside to warm up...

Not much spent today. Car back in the garage to replace the tyre that went flat - but actually it just had a nail in so they repaired it for me and just charged me a tenner :money:

Bought a couple of cuppa of tea at the meeting, total of £3.70 I think.

Oh, and i also bought some hair straighteners, reduced to £10 - never thought I'd bother but actually it looked really nice when they did it at the hairdressers the other week

Right, one last check on the ladies and I'm going back in, can barely see in front of my nose now...

Cheery_Daff

Evening MSE chums :hello:

Would you believe it's an entire year today since we moved house?! :eek: gosh how very different things are!!

The sun had been shining for a start - last year it was snowing as the removal lorry left and then two days later we were snowed in by the best from the east :eek:

Feel like we've done so many things, yet not half the things we could have done :rotfl:

We've got chickens of course :j one of my long term dreams come true and we've started making changes to the garden (which was just grass) - got a greenhouse up now and laid out raised beds over the winter, and planted a mini forest garden and orchard (well, about 8 fruit trees - does that count as an orchard??)

Been making my own compost all year, and production has rapidly increased since acquiring the chickens :j

Got to know a few neighbours, had a load of cows in our fields :eek:

Inside the main thing we've done is taken out the giant chimney breast all the way up to the roof (I say 'we' - it was actually all Mr Cheery :rotfl: ) Also swept the chimney (the one we didn't take out), had 3 new radiators fitted.

I've done lots of driving back and forth to the city which wasn't the plan :eek: although I'm barely going once a week at the minute which is great (except I have to go TWICE tomorrow!)

Hmm, let me see if I can think about financial things... (i'm sat in the chicken run waiting for the ladies to go to bed so you'll have to excuse my waffling - there isn't much else to do here and it's keeping my fingers warm!) :rotfl:

Cheery_Daff

So, a first year of finances...

As of 31st December we'd reduced the actual balance of the mortgage by about £8000 :j was sat at about £208,000 then I think, and obviously paid off another couple of months since then (some will go towards interest of course). Would LOVE to have it under £200k when the fix runs out in September so need to work out what I need to do...

Electricity has been expensive - partly cos 3 rooms had no radiators so were being heated with small electric heaters, and partly cos there's a giant hole from the kitchen to the roof so all the hot air escapes :eek: need to get on the case with the rest of the building work, yawn. Direct debit currently £75 a month and I can't see whether the meter is ahead or behind their estimate as we sealed the door to the cellar to stop the draught :rotfl:

Hang on, need to do chicken things...

Cheery_Daff

Gas is £84 a month (lpg tank) but since we used a whole tank full in 2 months before Christmas I suspect they'll up our DD next year :eek: again, hoping things will be warmer once kitchen ceiling is sorted.

Diesel :eel: we were spending £200 a month in the run up to Christmas :eek: although that's gone down drastically now, need to check figures.

Car insurance also reduced from £950 ish last year (first year of having 2 cars so I had no no claims bonus) to £500 this year, thank goodness.

Cheery_Daff

Sorry, had to break off to shove the new chickens in the hen house. Old ones take themselves to bed but new ones just roam about the run and end up perching in stupid places like on the arm of the stool thing I'm sitting on.

Or maybe they're just reluctant to get in the hen house given how stroppy the other two have been all day :eek:

Still, they're all now and I've shut the door so it's dark and I'm just going to have to sit here (again) til they've stopped bloody fidgeting...

What else. Not spent a penny on takeaways :rotfl: :rotfl: we often end up spending a fiver in a cafe two or three times a week between us but we did that anyway.

It is more expensive overall to live here, and I'm still struggling to save much from each monthly wage (well, anything )

But we have enough for our needs and many of our wants :j we have enough to do the rest of the work on the house, replace a car and a boiler if necessary, and we have no loans other than the mortgage.

Mr Cheery has plans to increase his income this year so that will go towards savings (although he does most of the DIY, house maintenance etc, plus trawling round supermarkets for bargains and picking up useful free stuff from freegle so that has disadvantages too).

Overall we are happy Life is very good :j :j

Cheery_Daff

And the chickens seem to have settled to sleep 15 mins earlier than yesterday so I'm going in to have a celebratory cuppa and warm my feet by the fire in my study

Karmacat

Wow, Cheery, what a great series of posts! A year since you moved ... your achievements are massive, you and Mr Cheery both, I really admire you for taking the plunge and going rural, onto basically a smallholding, I think its wonderful. The first few years in a place like that, I'm not surprised you're not saving anything - but if you've paid off money from the mortgage, its a repayment, yes? So its going down anyway, and you're investing in the house and the land, bringing it up the way you want it to be.



Many, many congratulations. Hope your toes are nice and toasty now