Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

foxgloves

@weenancyinAmerica - Hopefully that repaired leak will reduce your water bill. It's surprising how much even a dripping tap can waste over time.

How wonderful to take a writing class by Elizabeth George. I am intending to sign up for one of the BBC Maestro online writing courses in the New Year. I have all but stopped my creative writing despite having made reasonable headway with work on a novel, so I am thinking that taking this course will deliver the kick up the bum that I need. I hope so anyway. 
F

foxgloves

Remember that damned 🐸? Having swallowed it initially at the beginning of last month, there was a regurgitation. Further ingestion attempts ensued & up the bloody thing came again! This afternoon I have effected Amphibian Swallowing #3 & within the next hour & a half, I should know whether digestion can commence. Fingers, toes & paws crossed!! 
F

foxgloves

Hello Readers,
Well, there is good news & bad news.
Good news is that Frog Swallowing #3 was successful & I managed to secure an appointment & professional opinion of a roofer.
Bad news is that we need a new roof which will cost £8.5k. 
Good news is that we thankfully have an Emergency Fund which will cover this.
Bad news is that the bill would have been £1000 less if the previous occupant hadn't had foam insulation sprayed liberally onto the inside of the roof. To be fair, this was a long time ago, as we have been living here for 23 years & it is only in more recent years that the building industry, surveyors, insurers & mortgage providers have been flagging these coatings up as horribly problematic. 
Good news is that roofer has prioritised us for the work to start in January. I was pleased with that, as he took several calls even just in the time he was talking to me about sh*t roofs.
That's the frog swallowing issue in a nutshell. If that has reached your limit of reading about roof problems, then do skip the next explanatory bit & maybe wait for today's usual activities, which I'll get onto later, but for now, back to the roof.
No roof problems before. As I said, we moved here in 2002 & the previous owner had paid for the foam insulation work the previous year. Just before the pandemic brought a temporary halt to building work for 1st Lockdown, we had new soffits & fascias fitted. I know they had trouble fitting them. It was a freezing cold day & when they couldn't slide the first couple of tiles up to commence the work, they assumed that they'd frozen solid onto the roof. One of them took a blow torch to a couple of tiles to see if he could thaw them but couldn't, so he came in to ask me if, to my knowledge, we had ever 'stuck the tiles down' with anything. I said 'no', as we hadn't, but then I remembered that in our loft, the internal roof has been previously sprayed with that old plasticky gunk. So they managed to fit the new soffits & fascias, but not in the usual way, because the tiles are utterly unmovable. They got the work done & it all looked very smart. Fast forward to this summer when we noticed a little bit of a dip in a piece of the fascia boarding. Then the dip became a very definite sag. Big problem alert! When our hedge-cutter/tree-man/gutter cleaner came in October, he had a look at the problem & said that 2 of the roof tiles were cracked & mended with silicon which had obviously not been sufficiently watertight, meaning that rainwater had been coming through, collecting inside the new boarding & the weight of it had brought it down.I imagine that the workmen who struggled to move the tiles back in 2020 broke & tried to mend them. I assumed it'd just be a case of getting a repair done but found I had an unassailable niggle in the back of my mind that this was going to turn into a major issue because of that damned foam stuff. The 1st 2 roofing companies I contacted didn't even bother to reply, despite one of them being on a trusted tradespeople platform. I recontacted both of them twice, nothing. Both rude & poor business practice in my mind. Then I found another local roofer who had just finished some work in our village & was quoting for 2026 jobs. Good reviews/feedback. He was quoting for someone on the next street so said he'd call in to assess our job on route. And you know what? As soon as I mentioned the sprayed-on plastic insulation, he knew exactly the problem. Said the stuff is 'disastrous' as you can't get damaged tiles off to replace them without breaking several others. It is also a problem when selling one's home as not all mortgage providers will lend on homes with this type of insulation because it means that the roof timbers can't be inspected properly & the spray-on foam thing has, over the years, apparently been a pretty-much unregulated industry. Well, we are of course planning to relocate once Mr F retires (a few years as yet, but defo on the medium term horizon) & when we heard that the cost of a new roof will be less than the amount we will probably lose on selling our home when we move made up our minds. This spray-on plastic foam stuff is covered in depth on various online forums & I had also read about it prior to us having any tangible roofing problems so I don't think he was exaggerating. So last night, Mr F & I sat & discussed it from every angle, as it's obviously a big hit to our Emergency Fund. The short term issue is that we can't get the necessary repairs done properly unless roofers are able to move/replace the necessary tiles & that means we are not as water-tight as we should be. The longer-term worst case scenario is that when the time comes, we see the perfect property for us in East Anglia & lose it because selling our own home is problematic because of the issues around the dodgy roof. Anyway, lots of discussion & we decided to go ahead with it. I have today paid the deposit & put the anticipated work commencement date in my diary. I kind of feel like we didn't want this, but neither do we want the alternative, which is likely to be worse on both short & longer-term counts. 
A big positive is that when the work is finished, it will carry a 15-year guarantee so it will surely be a good selling point when the time comes that we have that document to show to prospective buyers/surveyors.
So that, m'dears, is the story of the frog-swallowing. I think, a positive, if expensive ending.
F 

Makingabobor2

Oh my word, what a big job. But as you say, at least you have the money in your EF. Hope it all goes well and the roofer gets good weather to complete it. Did he say how long it should take him? 

foxgloves

And now for today's post. I am enjoying the run-up to Christmas, so have been doing a lot of little jobs to do with that, really. Budget-friendly efforts as follows:
*Entered a competition.
*Did a few budget updates, including a transfer from the Present Pot to cover arrival of the last couple of Mr F's presents - now wrapped.
*Updated Spreadsheet 1 (Regular bills & DDs) with new annual amount for Micr*s*ft package. Wasn't too impressed to see this has gone up by 32.8%, which for me rather falls into the category of p*ss-take! The price has been static for a few years, but this still feels like a big rise all in one go. Decided to suck it up for the coming year, but to mark it in diaries a few months before next renewal to look at alternatives. Mr F will enjoy doing this.
*Remembered that there is £500 of extra buffer zone money in our current account atm - the last little bit leftover from when I was allocating the money I inherited from our elderly relative. This will cover the roofer's deposit & also cattery fees if I can get the 2 monkeys booked in for the week we have the work done. They will be hugely stressed by all the noise & strangers, especially Ash, who though very cuddly with us now, was pretty much feral at time of his rescue. It genuinely felt like a little positive remembering this sum of money when we have such a big outlay.
*Made a sourdough for baking first thing tomorrow.
*Made a batch of shortcrust pastry for baking Delia's vegetarian sausage rolls (cheese & onion) tomorrow.
*Made breadcrumbs ready for the above. Had over-estimated how many I'd need so we have a good sized chunk of loaf left for everyday use.
*Lined my baking sheets & dug out some decent patty tins - that's more about being organised than saving money, but time is important too, isn't it?
*Marzipanned Christmas cake & enjoyed eating every last little bit of the trimmings. What glorious stuff marzipan is! I never bother buying apricot jam for sticking it on. I use my home made marmalade as usually have plenty of that & it adds to the festive vibe.
*Tonight's nosebag is cheapo simplicity itself -  home made butternut curry from the freezer so only need to cook rice.
Still to do:
*Clean bathroom & change towels. Usual minimal products & washable cloths.
*Today's Advent items will be putting out a new festive bar of soap - "Winter forest" fragrance & topping up our reed diffuser with a similarly festive fragrance - juniper & something or other suitably wintery.
Was going to vacuum downstairs but as I am baking tomorrow, followed by wreath-making, I decided it'd make more sense to do it tomorrow & shark up all those bits too.
Oh, must just tell you about Mr F yesterday. He called into Waitbl00m on his way home to pick up some little purchase & it was their pre-Christmas open evening with various samples, etc. There was a member of staff near the door explaining to customers about their new 'Little treats' scheme. She was giving anyone not already in it a box of free gingerbread fudge to promote the sort of treats available. When she saw Mr F, she said, "I shan't give you a box as I know you are already doing 'Little treats' because I often see you in the shop & these are just for new people". He said jokingly, "Oh. But I WAS an early adopter" & she said, "Yes, ok you were" & handed him a box! Just shows that blatant cheek sometimes pays off, I suppose! Anyway, it's been added to the Christmas goodies in the pantry.
OK, am off to do those last couple of jobs, then I look forward to some sofa time.
Stay cosy,
F x 

Sun_Addict

When we first moved into our house it needed a new roof and that was a condition of the mortgage. As it happened Mr SA was a roofer so the building society were happy to lend as long as he carried out the work asap. About 20 years later he finally got around to it. A new roof is a good investment and that’s a pretty good price as our tiles alone cost £5k around 15 years ago but then this was Mr SA wanting top of the range ones. At least the labour was free! 

DawnW

Get Mr F to look at Apache Open Office, free to download and looks very similar to the MS stuff.

I have been using it for years, since I retired and no longer had access through work.

KajiKita

I agree that the roof work needs doing. For me a foam sprayed roof would either be a definite no to a property (up there with being a leasehold property) or negotiating down on the offer on the property to get it all changed … Absolute rip off process / system. Mr KK (time served carpenter) is horrified by it, as he says it stops the roof ‘breathing’. 

Love that you will put the cats in a Cattery when the work is being done so they aren’t stressed. A properly caring Meowmum ❤️

KK

PennysIntoPounds

Very glad for you the roof frog has been swallowed, and you've absolutely made the right decision.
Investing the money so you have the funds to grab the perfect home in East Anglia is well worth £8500, much as it would be preferable to not have to part with the emergency fund. But you're speculating to accumulate m'dear 🥂

Great that you remembered the £500, see, the universe is already helping out with the bill! 😁

John-Lewis had a good deal on 'lifetime' M-Office when I was looking recently 

Love the sound of festive soap and reed diffuser, these little touches bring so much joy don't they

Also love Mr F's cheeky freebie, good for him 🍻

Suffolk_lass

You might not want to use a cloud storage system for your computer files but Google Drive has Google sheets (spreadsheet) g-docs and so on. I don't like their slides but I rarely use it. And you could download the documents and save them locally (ie on a hard drive/removable storage) and just use the drive "office" set for document updating and creation.

On roofs, our re-thatching used all the sum that Mr Sl's original endowment policy paid out. That was in 2010. I am trying to find a thatcher to redo the ridge (has to be a guild of master thatchers person) now. Just so few that nobody replies. If I could, I would get a Dutch ridge (round clay ridge tiles). Just a few in the UK. Nobody knows how to. If it were me, I would look carefully at a zero% CC and if it charges a fee, factor that in, but you could keep most of the emergency fund making money for you, and either portion out the payments, or pay the minimum until the end of the zero term, to minimise your loss of the capital opportunity costs from the EF. Just saying...