Bricks Not Books

Thank you ab_saver! If you've got a Kindle then at least you can get some free eBooks! I'm signed up to BookBub, which generally tells you when a book is heavily reduced, but does also occasionally tell you when there's a free one.

Good luck with the saving!

Expenses got paid this week so swept them up for the OP pot, and just did a TT of £2.90 as well.

Finances have got away from me a bit this month as I paid bills and sorted out some wedding stuff and then OH paid me back a few weeks later. I've got in a bit of a muddle and can't remember what I moved out of savings for bills and what I paid off from my regular balance :undecided: Nevermind, it'll all come out in the wash, and I definitely haven't got in to debt through it. I need to remember to take better notes next month.

Last weekend I finally met the builder who's renovating our bathroom. Nice guy, seems very competent, OH and the in-laws had already met him, I've been communicating with him through email. Gave him a spare key and pointed out where various essential things were (like the stopcock for the water, and the kettle :rotfl:), he and his team started on Monday. OH drove over with his parents on Wednesday to get more painting done and apparently they'd already got a lot done in two and a half days! We're still a little disorganised with moving in so I need to start sorting out carpet, curtains and a bed!

This is the nuisance thing about our sale taking so long, I'd wanted to get everything done before Christmas so I could book a week off work easily and do as much as possible then. Unfortunately work is so swamped that I wouldn't be able to book a solid week off until April, when I'm off anyway for the wedding and honeymoon. This now means that I have to try and organise as much as possible for weekends, but distance then causes a problem with that too. Having a week would have been so much easier.

On the plus side wedding stuff is coming along well as OH had 3 days off this week and we used it to get paperwork done. We gave Notice of Intention to Marry on Monday, and then OH has been filling out the ceremony forms and the paperwork for the photographer yesterday, and bought his suit on Tuesday. After being the main person dealing with all the house stress last year it's nice to be able to hand paperwork to him and get him to sort it out :j

I have been massively procrastinating over wedding buying recently. We're getting OH's ring from the US through Etsy and even though I have they money saved I don't like to part with it Going to have to claw it out of my account next week as we want to buy it in plenty of time!

And next week we'll be making our first OP. I've requested a cashout from Textbroker, and I'll check for one last TT on Sunday as well, and then Monday I can phone up and hand over the money! Pot currently stands at £75.96, so with the Textbroker money we'll have over £80! :T Then we can see what February brings!

First OP has officially been made! Came in at £90.98 in the end, which was the £30 originally budgeted, plus extra money earned in January (big chunk came from Quidco) and a few Tilly Tidies, and then I rounded down the amount we owe according to my spreadsheet, so we now owe the bank £159615!

To get my spending back under control I'm going to go back to taking out a monthly cash budget. I think the problem I have at the moment is spending a lot of money on the house and wedding (saved) with my debit card, but also using the debit card for smaller amounts instead. I then get confused about what needs to be taken out of savings, and what is an every-day spend. Having cash should make that a lot more controllable, as it used to do with my food budget when I lived on my own.

Also managed to loosen the purse strings for the wedding - paid the deposit for the photographer and purchased my OH's wedding ring, money already saved up so it was just a case of transferring it.

We had a problem with the house at the weekend - a leak through the light fixture in the kitchen ceiling! I had been very excited to see the bathroom, which is now mould free (and tap free, toilet free, sink free, tile free, you get the picture, the bathtub was in place though!) and looking really good as a result, if a little bare :rotfl: But after having the heating on for a while we realised the kitchen ceiling was leaking. OH phoned his Dad who talked us through switching off the electricity downstairs, and we put a bucket under the leak, but we decided not to phone the builder as he'd already let us know that due to some important family stuff (not going to post about it on here) he wouldn't really be contactable over the weekend. I emailed him Sunday night instead and got an apologetic update email Monday evening saying they'd found the source of the leak and apologising for us feeling that we couldn't summon him for a genuine emergency! At the end of the day it wasn't like water was gushing out of the ceiling and I'm glad we found the leak now rather than later when the new flooring was down, so I told him to not to worry about it as we were just glad it was a quick fix.

Still not sure what our moving-in date is going to be but at least the bathroom is still on track. The electrician is going to test the light for us as part of his checks this week and make sure it's safe for us to use.

So with our first OP we have now brought the point where we'll fall under £155k forward by one month - it's now April 2017! Apart from that, not much else has changed :rotfl: But it'll be good to see the progress after a year! :j

OP in 2017 - £90.98

Went to the house yesterday and the bathroom looks brilliant! Bath is now plumbed in as is the sink and toilet, the tiling around the bath and the splashback for the sink is done, the towel rail is in place and the floor tiles are down! They also installed the waterpump for the shower, and fixed last week's leak (they found that the solder around one of the pipes had failed and had been made worse by the work, so they removed part of the pipe and sealed it and tested extensively, and the electrician also tested the light in the kitchen for us before putting it all back together). They still need to install the shower itself, put in the bath panel and the glass around the end of the bath (instead of using a shower curtain we've got a glass screen), and box in pipes and do general tidying up. Overall it's really coming along, it's amazing the difference that good lighting and white paint/tiles can make, the bathroom looks and feel so much bigger.

It now looks like they might be finished by next weekend, so we can move in before the end of February :T We still don't have a bed, or much else in the way of furniture or utilities, so next weekend is going to be VERY busy. OH might try to get a few days off the week after so he can be there to accept deliveries and let the carpet fitter in. All we need is for the main bedroom to be ready (walls painted, carpet put down, curtains put up, and bed assembled) as we're happy to make do with the living room being in a bit of a state for the time being. I can't get any time off work as we're way too busy at the moment, so it'll have to be OH. But it's me that needs to actually arrange the deliveries so I still have plenty to do.

Must remember to buy Argos stuff via Quidco!!

Nothing really to report on the OP front. Textbroker has been really quiet this week, nothing I felt I'd be able to write with a degree of confidence. Have been doing more surveys on Prolific though, so that's starting to build up again. I'm expecting a decent payout from Quidco again this month, but only if their estimated date proves correct.

I also posted a new review on Ciao, and got a snarky comment from someone about they weren't going to leave a rating due to the gap between the number of ratings I've given out vs. the number of ratings I've received from others, and "we're all trying to make extra money here". After a few hours of mulling over it, I've decided to just ignore the comment. If they'd bothered to get down off their high horse for 10 seconds they would have noticed that my last review on the site was 7 months ago, and since I've reviewed some fairly popular books and DVDs over the years I suspect that I've gained a bunch of extra ratings during my absence. I feel quite comfortable with the amount of ratings I give out to other people's work, given that when I am active on the site I only post one review a month. If I was reviewing stuff every day and rarely rating other's work I could understand their comment, but I'm not a massively active reviewer either.

Onwards and upwards and don't let mean people hold you back!

This week I've been adding some new cooking and baking recipes to Pinterest. I'm really looking forward to getting back in to the kitchen properly, I like being able to choose what I want when I want, and OH is quite an easy eater so cooking for him is nice, I rarely get a "I don't like that!" - I'm quite a fussy eater on the other hand so it's definitely better for me to be running the food side of things :rotfl: