Ding! Ding! All change, please... (now replaced with new diary on MFW)

starnac

foxgloves said:

Defo a good idea to check state of boiler, I agree, @Makingabobor2. We moved in here on a Friday night & on the Saturday morning, the boiler exploded! 
F

Oof! We moved in here on a Friday in October to find the boiler didn't work! I begged a friend who is a gas engineer to come and look at it but he still couldn't get the part to fix it til the Wednesday!

Makingabobor2

foxgloves said:

Defo a good idea to check state of boiler, I agree, @Makingabobor2. We moved in here on a Friday night & on the Saturday morning, the boiler exploded! 
F

Oh my word. That's definitely not good. 

Starlight_at_Sea

I agree about the merits of not having to do a lot in a new place. I lived with a lot of problems, then had major works for about 18 months in order to create a home I love. Now we are buying somewhere else, the circumstances that prompt this (caring for elderly parents) mean I really don't want any more decisions to make, let alone the upheaval of even minor works going on. I am not in the market for a doer upper! I made a list of every little thing I might want to change at the new build we are buying, which has been finished to a high standard. I managed to get quite a bit of the list put in as conditions of sale when we were negotiating. I figured the developer has easy access to the trades people to do things like moving external lights, adding an external tap, adding a wheelchair ramp, adding privacy locks to bedrooms, but I would need to be finding people and lining separate jobs up. When we ran out of space to negotiate the price down further, I was really pleased to get these things included, and to be fair to them, the developer has been really helpful and asked a lot of questions to ensure they get it right for our needs.

redofromstart

Sorry to hear nothings ticking the boxes. When we sold the last house we offered asking price on the one we wanted, who took it off the market instead, then we couldn't find anything and had no choice but to up our top spend by 50, the same day the place we bought was dropped into our new price range - serendipity. A money pit in need of much work but we have never regretted it, especially each May when the huge ancient wisteria is in in full bloom on the stone front. 

redofromstart

Oh and famous last words but our inefficient 70s gas boiler has never missed a beat in the last 15 years or so, next doors recent combo boiler has the manufacturers out every few months!

milann

You’ll know when it’s the right house for you….hope it turns up soon.

beanielou

foxgloves said:

Defo a good idea to check state of boiler, I agree, @Makingabobor2. We moved in here on a Friday night & on the Saturday morning, the boiler exploded! 
F

Blimey.That's frightening.

RelievedSheff

I agree with the others. The right house will present itself.

We knew the second we walked into this one that it was the house for us.

Randomly we didn't get the same feeling about the house on the opposite corner which was exactly the same house type but a mirror image and had an upgraded kitchen!

EssexHebridean

An up to date gas inspection will definitely be one of the things we'll be looking for! I also have a good pal who is a heating engineer so I'll be quizzing him about any potential issues he may be aware of with whatever make and model of boiler we end up with! Exploding boilers are definitely best avoided (insert blue haired eek emoji!) - although we had a similar issue on moving in where we are now in that the seller had failed to mention to us that the immersion heater thermostat was faulty - we didn't initially leave it on overnight as we didn't have a good grasp of the Economy 7 principles at that point, but a few days in we had left it on and were woken by the cat in the middle of the night, most distressed and determed we should investigate the strange noises coming from the hallway. As soon as we opened the bedroom door we were greeted with a wall of steam and rapidly realised that the immersion had overheated to the extent that it had vented into the cold water header tank (as it should) but was at the point where the water in that tank was nearing boiling point - the immersion itself was at clearly a VERY rapid boil. Took an hour of taps running in bathroom (cold) and kitchen (hot) sinks to get things back to a safe state of play, and to this day we are still bewildered what on earth possessed the idiot seller not to confess to something like that! (He didn't tell us about the shower that randomly ran absolutely screaming hot either mind you!) The cat got a LOT of dreamies and fuss for the next few days! 

It's a beautiful sunny day here - clear blue skies with just the odd wispy white cloud, and although chilly when I left home, it was already warmer enough by the time I parked the car that I debated whether to put my cycling jacket on, and I suspect by the time I return to the car I'll wish I hadn't! Plan for today is to cycle back to the car at lunchtime and then move the car closer to the office ready for a quick getaway later as I need to get back in time for the viewing. I've already confirmed I'm OK to leave a little early from work.

Another blob of interest landed on a savings account this morning, and I have confirmation from @t0m that  my little six month fix (personal money) which matures tomorrow will be transferred to my instant access pot in the first instance - so I'll let it land there then give consideration to what I plan to do with the money from there. I could bung it into a new ISA somewhere but right now I'm thinking I'm more likely to do another fix with that money. If I do that then I will add some money from what is currently in the instant access pot to it as well I think, then I can make  my personal savings focus building that back up again. 

General banking checked and all good - I altered the standing order for the service charge to the correct amount for the rest of the year's payments this morning so that is done ready for next month. I also corrected a glitch with the amount that transfers to the Holiday Fund each month as I got muddled when I tweaked it upwards a couple of months ago so it's been £5 more than we had really intended for the last few months.

I've run back through the budget sheet for forward planning with a mortgage incorporated and revised bills for the proposed move tweaking a few things, adding one savings amount that we'd prefer to keep on with (FD regular - the 7% one), correcting the home insurance figure (did a quote for the place we're viewing tonight) and removing the cost of the garage as MrEH has finally come round to the fact that once we have a house, and a shed (and LOTS of storage space!) we will not also be having a garage rented - at least certainly not in the first instance as that is an easy £50 a month we can save. Also tweaked income slightly (there is an extra £60 a month from my money that classes as joint income but usually goes somewhere separate to my main joint account contribution which can be incorporated) and now have a hopefully more accurate picture of what changes we'll need to make to the regular savings amounts - less than we originally feared, hopefully - and I'm still looking for more tweaks too. 

Tea last night was veggie pasta with wild garlic pesto - very tasty and all incorporating things that needed used up - the pesto came form the freezer. Even better MrEH completely failed to comment on it being meat free - amazing!  I'm doing couscous this evening as it's an easy one to do when we get back from the viewing - I got a tub of chickpeas out to defrost last night. As well as assorted roasted veggies it will have halloumi with it. I think I will get out a tub of curry for tomorrow, and I think there is a good chance that thursday will be sausages. I'm mainly planning meals from the freezer list at the moment so I need to revisit that ready for sorting out next week's food - no question we are seeing space start to appear in both freezers though so we're on target for getting freezer 2 off this side of our holiday I think. 

That's about it from here I reckon - I'll pop back if anything else occurs! 

RelievedSheff

Think we are having sausages on thursday as well.

The butcher at the farm shop had made some mango, chilli and lime sausages which looked lovely so I bought six and he gave me the last two for free 

Does mean we have a lot of sausage based meals later in the week though.