Tag: house

Yay, home ownership!

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Ever since we bought this house, it’s been fighting us when we try and improve it. Wiring in a breaker board was fun. Upgrading the boiler was more fun. Each time, we realize that at some point in its past, a real cowboy DIY “enthusiast” left his mark on this house and we’re still discovering just how loony he was.

We had a periodic electrical inspection done to certify the breaker installation and it turned up some gremlins in the wiring.The bad news is that it took a full day to work through them. The good news is that I thought it would take significantly longer! And to top it off, we only had to rip up a small portion of the floor. I had visions of the whole upstairs being torn up and trunking running down all the walls. All in all, it would seem that we’re going to get away with only 10 hours of electrical work. I can live with that.

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Christmas has come and gone.

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We’re back home after 6 days at the in-laws. Even though the house is in a bit of a state and we have no food, it’s good to be back home. It’ll take a few days for the normal routine to sink back in. We need to do a massive cleanup and sort out to fit all of the xmas schwag we got. Santa was a bit over generous, though the evil elf Visa might be grumpy for the next little while…

Overall, xmas was good. Was a bit sick on xmas day due to an over-indulgence with the good stuff, but a bit of a post-puke nap sorted that out. Have tons of pics that I want to post online. Everybody seemed to have a good time. There are so many leftovers its rather scary. We have tons of stuff we haven’t even opened yet. I might bring some stuff for the vultures at work cause otherwise were going to blow up if we eat all of the goodies we bought and brought back.

I did most of what I wanted to do in leics. We saw HP and the deathly hallows earlier I’m the week and we saw Tron Legacy last night. Very shiny shiny, a bit preachy and a good soundtrack.

Not exactly sure what the plan is for the next few days but I’m sure it’ll involve cooking and cleaning, and possibly lots of eating.

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Further proof of the insanity of the UK housing market

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This was in the Saffron Walden weekly news recently:

A National Housing Federation (NHF) report shows that the average house price across the district in 2009 was £303,923, while the median salary was just £23,421 – which means that buyers need 13 times their income to purchase a house. The average house price in the East of England was £215,260, 10 times the average regional income of £21,492. The NHF found that only one-third of young working households in the region could afford to buy a property at the lowest end of the house price range. Its findings come just after the Nationwide’s latest survey revealed that house prices in north Essex have almost doubled in a decade.

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Well there goes the motorcycle, for now…

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Le poop.

After going over the bills, it would seem that my plan to buy a motorcycle in the short term just went out the window. Our Canada trip cost rather more than we’d allowed for and our bathroom renovations ran a week longer then expected. Both of those combined mean that the money I had earmarked towards a bike needs to go towards something more utilitarian.

Oh well.

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Keeping calm and carrying on. Kinda, sorta.

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One week later and I’m walking – well, limping, really – but at least I’m back at work. My ankle is strapped in and I’m wearing my hiking boots (which do nothing for my foot odour) so it’s not too bad. I don’t need to take painkillers any more and the swelling is mostly gone. There is still a kick-ass bruise on both sides of my ankle but it’s now multiple pretty colours and that’s also going away.

We spent the weekend in Leicester. Good news, we have curtains! They cost a damn sight more than we expected them to, but at least we have something that Katy and I can agree on. It should be the last big thing we need to spend on. It needs to be the last big thing we spend on, because we’re broke at the moment and since Katy’s maternity pay is ending next month, our budget will be tight for the next few months. Joy, joy, stress, stress, stress. Really, it’s doable but we’ll need to be frugal – something we’re really, really bad at doing.

We went to see two movies: Coraline and Terminator:Salvation. Coraline is really funky and I’ll be buying it when it comes out on DVD (see? not frugal!) T:S was very meh. Ok, but nothing spectacular. They did manage to tie in nicely into the first and second movie, but… dunno. I wasn’t hanging on the edge of my seat. BTW, when did the movies become so expensive??? Tickets for two adults for a matinee, two medium soft drinks, the smallest popcorn available (which was still bigger than a whole portion of microwave popcorn that I usually share with Katy) and a small ice cream: £30!!! How the hell do teenagers afford that? I mean, shite!

We got our new sofa on Friday. The thing is f’n HUGE! I knew it was big and it knew it would fit, but seeing it in a giant showroom doesn’t do it justice when you imagine how it’s going to look in your living room. I had to ask the delivery men to put the old couch in the back shed because they said that it wouldn’t fit in the office. I think it’s partially that they didn’t want to be arsed to make it fit through the door, but they have planted the seeds of doubt about getting it in its proposed resting place and that doesn’t make me a happy bunny. More to come later when we attempt to pry it in :)

The BenBen was a bit of a handful this weekend. We think his teeth are giving him grief. It’s coming up to the right time and he’s showing some classic signs of it. He’s drooling on everything! And I mean droooooooooling. My clothing gets soggy just looking at him. We’re going to go see a dermatology nurse about his eczema. Hopefully it’s something he’ll grow out of and it’s just being aggravated because of the heat at the moment. We’ll see what she has to say.

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Our new bed will be gorgeous, when it gets here

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We ordered a beautiful, stained timber four-poster bed from Kubek, a furniture store in Leicester. We’d been lusting after that bed for years and we’ve always said that when we buy a house, we’ll get The Bed. We bought a house. We bought The Bed. It was supposed to be delivered yesterday. The thing is fricken’ huge and weighs a ton. It was assembled without hitch (the guy even commented on how smoothly it was going). It is beautiful.

It is the wrong size.

We ordered a king sized bed. They delivered a double. It is not a simple problem of having another bed delivered. They’re made to order from Malta. Apparently the guy in Malta (a gentleman called Tony who will shortly receive a bollocking) shipped the wrong bed. When Kubek received their shipment, they checked that all the pieces were there and that it all fit, but they didn’t realize that it was the wrong size. It’s only when the assembly man tried to fit the mattress slats and they wouldn’t fit that something clicked. The bad news is that the next shipment isn’t due until July. They’ll see if they can get cross-members of the right size shipped sooner, but no promises there. They were falling over themselves to apologize and, in essence, we’re still fine to sleep in our old bed in what will be the guest bedroom.

So close, and yet so far.

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Ow!

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Things were productive at casa Richard this weekend. We secured all of the shelves and bookcases to the walls and managed to clear out all the boxes of books and DVDs. I put up a curtain pole in the office and we bought waaaay too many clocks on a random trip to Scottsdales (where we were only supposed to buy a house number and some cat food). The shed is piling up nicely with stuff we won’t need to keep in the house, as sheds are wont to do.

I other news, I managed to brain myself quite efficiently on Saturday. All my tools are in a cupboard under the stairs and, when I went to get some rawl plugs to fix the aforementioned bookcase, I got up a bit too quickly while I was still under the stairs. I’m sure I dented my skull. I was ok for Saturday but I’ve been having a minor headache since Sunday. I think it’s just a big bruise, but the migraine I got this morning really isn’t helping matters. It’ll either go away by itself in a day or two or I’ll be dead from an undiagnosed cerebral hematoma (note to self, do NOT go read stuff on Wikipedia).

Anyway, it was a grand weekend and we got lots done and we ate lots and there was ice cream. If it wasn’t for the ding on my head, it would have been close to a perfect bank holiday weekend.

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Tiredness, and stress. And more tiredness.

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I have repainted the whole of the upstairs of the Hinxton house. All the floors have been vacuumed to within inches of their lives (Katy has the blisters to prove it). We’ve done all that we’ve humanly could to make the house clean and tidy. The house is in a *much* better state than we’ve left it in. And still, it would seem that the powers that be aren’t happy. I fear for our deposit. We need that money, and it’s not an inconsiderable sum. If it’s less than 1K, I’ll have to look at our legal recourses. I am not happy. I don’t need this shit right now.

In other news, we gave in and let the cats go out this morning. For the past two weeks, they’ve been cooped up in the house and have turned into unbridled bundles of energy. Even Tolstoy was poinging everywhere and playing with random shit. We’d planned on letting them out this weekend but had to relent because they were spending their nights chasing each other all over and house and up and down the stairs for hours on end. It sounded like a herd of rampaging elephants. This is not conductive for a good night’s sleep. It also doesn’t help that BenBen has decided that 5am is a good time to wake up. As such, I am currently exhausted.

And stressed.

I do not like this situation.

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