Mortgage free in Forever Home :-)

LadyWithAPlan

All the gardening food and books sounds v relaxing  
great way to wind down the year 

KajiKita

Mr KK and I were discussing plans for 2024 over lunch. He is eager to get our bathroom renewed as we have a cobbled up shower arrangement over a bath that is lethal to get in and out of, no extractor fan, unheated mirror, a hand basin that is tipped backwards so all the water / splashes accumulates behind the taps and a radiator that only works on the CH so our towels go fausty in damp summer weather. I had put a mental limit in it of £3K - any more than that and it impacts what I think we need for remortgaging, EF and investing in solar, which I would rather do. 

Costed it all out just now (at cheapest possible, retail prices) and it comes in at c. £3,252, which is not as bad as I feared it might be. This does include a week’s earnings for Mr KK as we are agreed we want it done and dusted, not dragging on like the lounge did. This job might therefore be a possibility for 2024 …. I have several items that I will put in my watchlist on FBMP on the off chance we might be able to reduce costs there and we are going to look around some of the local plumb centres / builders merchants to do a further cost check as well. 😊

Off to check what seeds I have now …. 😊

KK

beanielou

Go for it. 

That would be fab. 

Your current one sounds a real trip hazard. 

redofromstart

The bathroom plans sound excellent. We swapped out the elderly avocado room here a few years after we moved in and it was the best money we spent. Ours needs a ten year refresh and the en suite needs plumbing in this year...

redofromstart

So, gardening. I've read the sample chapters and will probably commit real money shortly.

i have an established sunny veg plot, and what i think I need to do is strip off the annual weeds on the next sunny day and add a good solid layer of horse manure and a few boxes of the rehydrated coir compost and then leave it alone for a few months. The polytunnel and greenhouse want weeding and the permanent beds topping up but not digging. And I want a copper trowel to go with my lovely gifted stainless steel border fork and spade.

the witch hazel is flowering brightly. Lovely thing, would buy other colours if I saw them 

CCW007

I get you on the bathroom - ours is half tiled and has a fab corner shower cubicle we installed after putting a foot through the base of the previous cubicle.  But it still has the 70s orange cast iron bathtub and there's no flooring as all the electrics are directly underneath the room 🙄 and so the sink unit is wedged on a tile to give us space for flooring underneath.  It's been like that for about 8 years 🤣

KajiKita

@beanielo, @redofromstart, Mr KK appreciates your support! 😉😂
@redofromstart, it sounds like the sample chapters have got your gardening mojo moving 😊 I bought myself a copper trowel but it didn’t last long. My soil wasn’t in good enough condition (yet) for it to be usable. What colour is your witchhazel? 

@CCW007, wow …. Not sure I could have lived with a bathroom like that for long …. But I suppose you learn to dance around the gaps, not lean on critical things etc. 

Spent some time sorting seeds this afternoon. I have loads I don’t want (gifts, came free with magazines etc.), so have bagged them up and offered them to a local community garden. If they don’t want them, I will see if there is a local allotment that might want them. Tomorrow’s job will be to be look at the sowing / planting times of them and map that out by month. I feel a GANTT coming on ….! 😳😂😂

KK 

Cheery_Daff

Ooh, lovely bathroom plans!! I really want to do ours, but flatly refuse to start another room until everything in the kitchen/dining room/ bedroom is finished. We have a history of utterly glacial DIY and I can't handle any more 'in progress'  rooms! 

Although that does mean living with the current bathroom. It's perfectly functional, but all the walls are tiled and painted with green emulsion, which is slowly getting more flaky. I peeled it off round the shower area as it was just coming off in chunks whenever I tried to clean, so now that looks ridiculous 🙄 There's an utterly grim green carpet in there too 😬 I refuse to even start pulling things out yet though, however hideous. I could have just replaced the carpet, but what's the point? We actually have a new bath, with feet 😁 It's been in the shed for 3 years 🙄 New flooring will need to go all the way under current bath, so literally no point doing that. 

So it will have to wait. You saying a week for yours shows me just how ridiculous this is 😂 But then again I'm not any kind of professional builder, and also don't have a week off, and Mr Cheery has time and skills but no inclination, so it will just have to wait its turn. Maybe later this year! 

Love a good Gantt chart 😁

CCW007

Every job in this house is linked and nothing can be done independently - plan is to split into two to make en suite and family bathroom including laying flooring, which can't be done until fuse board is moved from underneath the toilet, which could only be done once we rewired the downstairs, which meant taking kitchen apart to plaster... I could go on 😁

@Cheery_Daff that sounds so familiar! 

KajiKita

@Cheery_Daff, what’s left to do in the kitchen, dining room, bedroom? Any of them possible to knock over this year? Do you have a GANTT for any of them ….? 😉

BTW, we are only saying a week for the bathroom as neither of us could bear for it to go on longer than that, each of us showering in work, the dust and mess etc. 😉 It would need serious and definitive co-ordination of trades though. We have a tame plumber who is a work colleague of Mr KK’s, but sparkies are an elusive breed round here …. There was one mentioned on the village WhatsApp - ought to record his details actually …. 🤔 Thanks for the prompt 😊 There is one job we could do in isolation though, to the rest of the tasks - which is to change the window from the full width of the room, to a tall, narrow one offset away from the shower corner. That will be a hideous mess, but won’t need to disable the bathroom functions to execute. That making good of the original window opening would need doing before the new corner shower could be installed (atm it would be over the window, iyswim). 


KK