The Ongoing Saga of Ruby Trying to Own A Home

greent

I definitely like option 3 the most - as I was reading them I chose that before I read it was your preferred. It makes sense and matches your needs. (Open shelves always sound better than they are in my experience - you want them to be pretty and practical and utility items don't usually do both things - unless you spend ££ on cutesy storage solutions (that end up not being quite right...)

ruby_eskimo

That's exactly what I thought @greent - I would drive myself mad trying to keep it looking "good" while DH just throws things everywhere.  At least with cupboards we can just throw things in there and worry about it later 😂

Well we've ordered the kitchen and utility room units so it will be all go in February 😳  Have paid for the utility room stuff and just waiting for the company to remove the delivery fee for the kitchen order before paying that off.  On Saturday we went to look at floor tiles, thinking we wanted limestone but after taking the kitchen samples with us, we've decided on some stone effect porcelain tiles instead.  Company are sending us some samples this week to make sure we're happy with them in our lighting and then we'll have to put an order in quickly as they're discontinuing that range.  But that does mean they are on serious sale so saving some money there against what we budgeted for flooring 👍

Probably the most exciting news from the weekend is I managed to actually have a bath IN THE NEW BATHROOM 🥳  It was so lovely and much needed and was so different to the old bathroom.  Made me very excited to see the difference that a new kitchen will make.

South_coast

All very exciting news 😀! If the tiles are being discontinued, would be worth ordering a few extra boxes just in case any get broken in the future 

ruby_eskimo

Well ahead of you @South_coast and have added a bunch of extra to the quote we got with the flooring company 👍

LadyWithAPlan

Yeah to the bath being usable !! 

Sounds like all going well here and hope you get your contract updated to reflect the work 

South_coast

ruby_eskimo said:

Well ahead of you @South_coast and have added a bunch of extra to the quote we got with the flooring company 👍

Excellent 👍

ruby_eskimo

Builder called last night to say he wants to get started next week with ripping everything out and prepping for the new kitchen 😳  Appreciate the enthusiasm and very glad I didn't have any plans for the weekend so we can pack the kitchen up 😂  No seriously, I know we had problems with the bathroom so I know he wants to make sure he has time to fix anything unexpected.

ruby_eskimo

It's all go here - skip is arriving today, tiles have been ordered and paid for (the tiler was very complimentary about the amount I ordered as it was what he would have ordered too 👍), kitchen is paid for, oven and hob ordered and paid for and we've (meaning DH...) picked some handles for the cabinets. Only problem is those are also being discontinued so we've had to be creative with how we can get enough for all the doors and drawers.  DH has 2 work colleagues who have collected orders in the North, I drove 150 mile round trip to pick up some from 3 stores and we have some on order for home delivery.  Just got to hope we've done the maths correctly!

And while we're spending all our house savings, we've ordered a new sofa too because it was heavily discounted in the sales and our old one has lasted over 12 years and is now collapsing in the middle.  Had a win on that front because the matching footstall was over £600 🤯 but I managed to find a cover for our old one for sale on ebay that looked like it could match.  So I took the fabric swatch for the sofa into the big yellow and blue Swedish shop and sure enough it's a match 🥳  So for less that £50 we get to keep the footstall we love and saved ourselves a lot of money!

Appreciate that this is supposed to be about paying off the mortgage and we're spending a lot of money at the moment but it's all things that need doing.  I didn't thought we'd be in a position to get it all done so quickly but we have the cash saved and was allocated for house "stuff" so we might as well just go ahead and do it.  

ruby_eskimo

After only just getting my office set up finalised, it's now been turned into our temporary kitchen 😂 

The team have been here an house and so far I've been told that we were not that far off having a fire in the kitchen because of some very dodgy electrics 😳, there's been a bit of a water leak behind the old dishwasher and they have no idea where the gas valve is so they can disconnect the old oven.  So sounds like we're in for the same fun ride we had with the bathroom / plastering last year. 

On the plus side they're going to re-insulate the loft space above the kitchen for free as we had a bunch of insulation left over from last year when they did the ceilings so that should help us save some money in heating costs again.

debtfreewannabe321

Well done on all the projects on the go and handling it all whilst working. We did this in our last house as we had money put aside. However I couldn't cope with a full time job around it so I only worked a few hours a week and even that was too much whilst trying to project manage 😂 so well done you.