A month of bathrooms

by In Ethel's House, Renovations, Tiny Cottage Tagged 1 Comment

I seem to have spent about a whole month thinking about bathrooms. We don’t have much space in the current project, but I’d been sent into William Wilson by my plumber to choose some wet wall for the bathroom in Ethel’s and saw this layout while I was in there, which I really liked – so I borrowed a tape measure off them and sent this picture plus measurements to our architect to see if we could do something similar.

Grey and white bathroom layout, William Wilson, Thurso

As it turned out we didn’t have quite enough widthways because of the stairs, but using that as inspiration he came back with three different layout options, two with a bath, one without, but warning me that if I had a bath in there, it was going to be pretty tight to get a large enough electric water heater in under the stairs. We ended up marking out the bathroom dimensions on a site visit and what looks like quite a large space on graph paper actually isn’t when you’re standing in it.

So I mused on it and while I was musing I had a weekend away in Inverness with Mr J in a hotel room with the biggest bathroom I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. As in you went down a staircase inside the bedroom to get to it.

Bathroom in Room 1, Rocpool Reserve hotel, Inverness

And yes, that bath was gorgeous and I soaked in it up to my chin in hot water, but it took about half an hour to fill and I did get a bit fed up waiting for it. (There was also a TV on the wall to the left and the loo was hidden round the corner behind the basins). We did love the shower, however, so as soon as we got home I called my business partner and suggested we went for the big walk-in shower option – it would save about £1,000 on not needing the hot water cylinder as well. He was up for that, so back it went to the architect to find out just how big we could make our shower tray.

We’ve ended up nicking a bit off the living room alcove, but we’re going for a 1500 x 800 shower tray with wetroom-style shower screens and a top of the range electric dual-headed shower. I think it’s going to look fabulous and as we’re pitching this as a romantic hideaway (hence the idea of having a double-ended bath in there in the first place) it’s big enough to get two people into it.

And that wet wall I was choosing that started all this off? That’s been installed, along with a new shower (all of it: tray, enclosure and mixer), new loo, new basin and the floor under the loo that had started to rot thanks to condensation running down the underside of the bowl has had the rotten bits removed and replaced with spare bits of flooring we had left over – I still have a whole unopened box of the stuff, so we’re okay for repairs for a while. It looks absolutely great and the first guests to use it haven’t reported any issues (they’ve been here 10 days now and there are four of them, so it’s had a good workout!)

Bathroom, Ethel’s House, Armadale

Ethel’s House – the costs

by In Ethel's House, Finances 2 Comments

I’ve just realised that I never did a post about what it actually cost to renovate Ethel’s House. And this one is only happening today because I’m procrastinating about doing one for Coldbackie, because I know I’m not going to like the result!

So, Ethel’s wasn’t a traditional purchase in the sense that we were buying two croft tenancies that happened to have a house on one of them, rather than buying an actual house. We paid £95,000 and at the time of purchase the croft with the house on was valued at £75,000 and the bare croft at £25,000.

Our first purchase on the project was in October 2015, two months after our offer was accepted but four months before it completed, when Mr J got a bit overexcited on Tooled Up and bought himself a pair of plasterboard props. We finally got the keys at the beginning of March 2016 (nothing involving crofts ever happens fast) and the spending started in earnest. We had our first guests at the beginning of March 2018, so the figures below cover pretty much exactly two years.

Bills – £3,311.02
Two years of electricity, oil and council tax when I ran out of exemption time.

Interest – £9,933.31
You can’t get commercial lending on a croft tenancy unless the house site has been decrofted, which it hadn’t. We were exceptionally lucky in that family members were prepared to lend to us, but we agreed it was only fair that interest should be charged.

Legal – £766
Fixed-fee conveyancing from our lovely solicitor.

Tools – £618.94
Mr J was relatively restrained here, for him! (This is a man with many, many sheds…)

Materials – £16,648.76
Now the numbers are getting bigger. This covered things like insulation, flooring, plasterboard, internal doors, carpets, the kitchen units and so on.

Tradesmen – £56,349.27
Wallop! This was the painful one, although it does include a lot of tradesman-supplied materials as well. Top of the list, a brand new roof in slate, £19,367.80. £9,000 for totally rewiring the house, £8,300 for the underfloor heating system (and that didn’t include a new boiler) and £9,300 in total for joinery work.

Subtotal – £87,627.30
I’m subtotalling here because if we’d decided to sell the house, this is where we’d have stopped. When we bought it, the croft Ethel’s stands on was valued at £75,000, that included the stone byre outbuildings and about 6 acres of fields. We got a £5,000 discount from asking price, so take £2,500 off each croft, bringing it down to £72,500. When we got a mortgage on it, in May 2018 (after doing all the required paperwork to decroft the house and a very small piece of garden ground behind it), the house and little bit of garden were valued at £165,000. So add, say, another £10,000 on for the rest of the six acres and the four stone outbuildings to give a finished value of £175,000. Subtract the original £72,500 and the £87,627.30 spent and you end up with a profit of £14,872.70. Not a lot for two years of hard work if you divide it up by the hours we put in, but at least it was a positive figure!

Furnishings – £14,627.95
But of course we didn’t sell it and I underestimated how much it costs to kit out a house from scratch! Furniture and white goods were, of course, the major part of this, coming in at £11,105.78, but then you’ve got cushions, duvets, pillows, pictures, curtains, table lamps, log baskets, all the kitchen equipment, cleaning stuff and three complete sets of bed linen and towels (one in use, one in the wash, one ready for changeover). Take all that off and the profit comes down to a tiny £244.75.

But we now have a wonderful warm house that guests love to stay in and in non-Covid times it’s producing a decent income, which was the ultimate aim. Looking at local prices, I would say it would now value £10,000-£15,000 more than it did in 2018, so as long as we keep it well-maintained it’s acting as a savings account for my retirement.

Busy, busy, busy

by In Ethel's House, Holiday letting Tagged , , , 2 Comments

Many apologies for the radio silence, it’s been an astonishingly busy few weeks, mainly down to the arrival of our lambs!  32 of them running around the place now, with one last ewe holding out on us, though she has an udder like a football, so I hope number 33 will be with us before too much longer.

Guests have been coming and going at Ethel’s and we’ve had a few more bathroom issues.  Jeff’s bottle trap fixed the basin leak and I haven’t had any further comments about leaks in the shower, but I did get a message from one set of guests to say the shower was backing up to the point where they’d had a small flood in the bathroom.  So Jeff and I went down there while they were out (with their permission) and investigated.  First stop, check the shower trap – clear (I take the hair out of it at every changeover, not my favourite job, but important).  Second test, flush the loo, which is below the the shower in terms of the way the water runs.  Water level in shower trap rose slightly, indicating there was a blockage somewhere between the house and the soakaway.  John Angie had told us that the drains can block at one particular point and he used to rod it every three months – now, we hadn’t touched it in 2 years and I doubt Ethel’s son did when he lived there for a while in the 2 years after she died either.  We lifted the access point John had pointed out and sure enough, it was backed up, indicating the blockage was further down.  One set of rods, a satisfying sucking noise and a miniature ancient fatberg later, it flowed away, but Jeff advised getting Magnus (the house painter) over, as he had the right equipment to power flush the whole system through.

Magnus turned up two days later, after the guests had gone, lifted the cover to the first rodding point right outside the bathroom and…

Yes, the scourge of all septic tank systems – the wet wipe!!  I think we need a better sign for the top of the toilet – the one provided by the agency says only soft tissue may be flushed down the toilet and it appears that people are taking that to include the dreaded wipes.  Magnus, who needs a bravery medal, cleared it, flushed the system, and so far it seems to be behaving itself, but he thinks we might benefit from having the soakaway redone at some point, as it’s not working too effectively right now.

Then on Thursday last week we had to get Jeff back again, as the hot water stopped working.  A quick investigation revealed the culprit, a hole in a rubber hose inside the boiler, which had obviously been rubbing against something and gradually eroding.  Fortunately Jeff had the right part at home and was able to repair it straight away.  I peered into the tank to check there was oil in it, could see my reflection but didn’t have anything to dip it with, so we fired it up and it started working – all seemed good.  At midnight I got another email from the guests to say it had stopped working again, so I went down there at 7am with a bamboo cane and found the oil level was below the outlet pipe from the tank.  Given I’d put 500 litres of heating oil in there about two months previously, that was not good news – I’d had the same amount put in our tank at home at the same time and that was nearly half full still.  We appeared to have lost 200-300 litres from the leak.  I called the two oil delivery companies, neither of whom were coming west that day (Friday), but got a delivery booked for today (Monday).  Our thought was to try and find someone local with a small pump, siphon some oil out of ours and take it down the road, but when a number of phone calls drew a blank, we suddenly remembered that Allans of Gillock, the agricultural store where we buy our red diesel for the tractor, also has kerosene on pump, so I emptied all our jerry cans into their respective bits of machinery, drove over to Watten, filled them with 75l of kerosene, lashed them all together in the boot so they wouldn’t fall over, drove back, emptied them into the tank, hit the reset button on the boiler and….nothing.

Jeff, who by this point was probably qualified to put ‘damsel in distress rescuer’ on his business cards, arrived 15 minutes later, diagnosed a lot of air in the system, bled it, and it started up just fine and has been working ever since.  I saw the Simpsons lorry go up the road this morning, so I can now stop worrying that this week’s guests are going to run out of oil.  ‘Dip tank’ will be added to the list of monthly maintenance tasks!!

We are now on our eighth set of guests and are starting to get less panicky that people are going to hate it and give us bad reviews.  So far we have three out of three 10/10 scores on Revoo (which get displayed on our listing with the agency) and the comments in the visitors’ book have been amazing.  I’ve learned that to do a full changeover of all five bed spaces is about seven loads of laundry (depending on whether they used all the towels as well) and that the next set of bed linen I buy is going to have fitted sheets instead of flat – slightly harder to iron, but a lot quicker to make up!  Bookings-wise, we’re now up to 113 nights booked and a little under £8,500 of revenue after the agency’s fee is taken out.

As regards the other house, missives are concluded and we’re completing on Thursday, but in the meantime I’ve got involved with two other little projects on the side.  One is our own house, which has needed a new roof for a while, so Pete and his new sidekick, Al, have been taking the fibre cement tiles off it and replacing with proper heavy slate.  It looks fabulous.  James, who is now a delivery driver, has even been back to cut the scallops, just like he did for Ethel’s.  We were going to go for diamonds either side of the Velux, but it’s not quite central and it would have sent Mick’s OCD bananas, so we’re having a big diamond on the porch roof instead!

The other project is our village hall!  I’m now the hall committee secretary and we’re applying for a big grant from the local wind farm to turn our lovely old traditional hall into something fit for use.  We’re working with a local architect, who’s come up with the brilliant idea of building a new structure around the old hall, so it becomes the main room within the new building.  We’re planning to provide facilities not just for the village, but for tourists passing on the North Coast 500 and people visiting the beach, so it’ll have toilets, showers and a laundry room which can be open for public use while the main hall and the kitchen remains locked up.  This is what it looks like at the moment, just after the landscapers had been in to clear out the overgrown car park and take down a few trees.

So lots and lots to get my teeth into and I can’t wait to get going with Tor Aluinn!

Settling in

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Our first three sets of guests couldn’t have been nicer, they’ve all left us lovely comments in the guest book, one has left us 10 out of 10 on Reevoo, which is the feedback service Cottages.com uses for its properties, and they’ve been very patient with the little teething troubles we’ve had.  I was away when the second guests checked out, so Mick popped his head in to make sure all was okay and turn the heating back down.  He reported all was fine, they’d very kindly stripped the bed and left used towels in the bathroom.  ‘Perfect,’ I thought, ‘Don’t need to do much before the next lot arrive on Saturday.’  On the Saturday morning I waved Mick off to London for work and went down to clean.  Picked up the towels from the shower tray and found they were all soaking.

You can insert your own Scooby-Doo ‘Ruh-roh’ noise here.

Yes, there was a massive leak in the back corner of the shower where the glass screen met the wall.  Neither Jeff nor Pete were picking up, but Pete’s was going straight to voicemail which indicated he might actually be using it, so I sent him a text to see if there was any chance he was free to come and rescue me and then got on with sorting out the rest of the house.  Three hours later, when I’d finished everything else that needed doing, I went home, watched a few YouTube videos on how to use a silicone gun, thought it didn’t look that difficult and was just marching back up the drive with it tucked under one arm and a knife in my pocket, when Pete screeched to a halt at the top of the drive.  He’d actually been in the village when I was trying to call him, but his phone had no signal, and he’d got all the way home to Reay before my message had got through.  He tried to call me back, but my phone had no signal here either, so he’d rummaged in his shed for some silicone, jumped in his van and come all the way back.  On a Saturday.  Megastar!

I left the guests a note asking them to try and avoid spraying that area of the shower too heavily that evening and asked them to let me know if there were any further problems.  On Tuesday they let me know there was a bit of a leak from another bit of the shower and the basin was leaking like mad.  This time I really did need to summon up Jeff.  I went down while they were out on Wednesday afternoon and managed to fix the shower myself (proud DIY moment!) and then Jeff and I took the basin to pieces on Thursday morning.  His theory is that there are too many joints in the U-bend waste pipe and the angle it goes into the wall is putting pressure on them and loosening them.  He tightened everything up, stuffed a towel into the back of it to catch drips and is coming back tomorrow with a bottle trap waste, which he reckons should solve the problem.

The next guests are due on the 14th and if we’re very lucky with the weather next week (this week is rubbish) we might get the problem chimney harled before they arrive.  Pete has finished the big job he was working on and has been bringing all his scaffolding to our house today (he’s going to replace our roof with proper slate as our old fibre cement slates are completely knackered), so it’s here and ready to go up down the road if we catch a break.

Ethel’s is now removed from the council tax register and onto business rates.  I’ve applied for 100% rates relief, which I should get, but it would be about half the normal council tax if I had to pay it in full.  Scottish Water is coming on Monday to survey the house to see if I’ll be better off with a water meter fitted and then I have to find a water provider.  Apparently there are 20 to choose from in Scotland at the moment (list here), so I need to work my way through those later and see if any of them give the remotest hint of what prices might be like.  I only need water supply, the drainage is to a private septic tank, so that’s one fewer bill at least.

The final thing I have to arrange is commercial waste and recycling collections.  The Highland Council has a very easy form to fill in and, even better, lets me split my year into two seasons, so I can have a fortnightly collection from 1st April to the end of October, which is the usual residential cycle, and then from 1st November to the end of the year on 31st March, I can just have an uplift once a month, which helps save me money.  Unfortunately I got an error message submitting the form, so I’ll have to try again tomorrow, but for a normal sized wheelie bin for a self-catering cottage, the current Highland Council price is £5.03+VAT for a rubbish bin and £2.20+VAT for a recycling bin, so not extortionate.

In Coldbackie news, we have all the financing in place, which is absolutely fantastic.  Just a small boundary query for the solicitors to sort out between them and then we should be all systems go.

Girl done good

by In Ethel's House, Finances, Holiday letting Tagged , , , 2 Comments

The day our first guests were due to depart, I saw no car when I went to feed the sheep, so went in through the main gate rather than the back one and noticed a pink envelope on the coffee table in the living room.  I went in and found that not only had they left the house practically cleaner than it was when they arrived, but they’d also left us a thank-you card and this very lovely message as the first entry in our visitor book.

I really hope they’re all like this!  I emailed them to say thank you and they gave me a couple of bits of useful feedback, firstly that there was a draft coming from the front door (which I have been trying to replicate and have concluded that I need to put something in the information book about lifting the handle up to engage the entire multi-point locking system when closing the door, because that’s the only way I can make it happen) and secondly that the shower screen leaked.  We have, I hope, got that fixed after Mick checked and then re-did the seals around it – it’s just finishing off 48 hours to dry out and then I’ll give it a test tomorrow.

Today has been an exciting day as the valuer came round.  He couldn’t give me a number then and there, but he did say the stunning views and the fact that it’s essentially a new house inside a traditional shell (he said he doesn’t see many traditional croft houses in this kind of condition, which I hope was meant in a positive way!) would be reflected in the value, so I am hopeful that we’ll at least get to the figure I estimated on the Cumberland application and possibly even exceed it.  The last two three bedroom houses sold in the village, which were both in good repair, went for £15,000 and £22,000 more than the number I came up with.  He was carrying on west and going to value the house we’re buying straight afterwards, which was useful, because I was able to tell him what I’d estimated rental income at and he said that without even seeing the house, that sounded reasonable – although obviously again, he couldn’t guarantee that’s what would go in the valuation report without going round it.

Anyway, he said he’d get his reports back to both banks by the end of the week and since these valuations are the last things I’m waiting on before full formal mortgage offers are issued, I think I’m going to spend the next few days biting my nails.  The solicitors are primed and ready to go!

We have lift-off

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What a week.  David came back with a newly-toughened understairs cupboard door and also two custom-made plank doors for the byres.

Pete turned up on Tuesday morning and decided the woodburner wasn’t safe to light.  What’s happening is that rain is being forced through the porous blocks in the chimney and onto the outside of the flexible flue liner where it touches the chimney wall.  The water, thick with soot and tar, then runs down the flue liner and drips down the stovepipe onto the hearth.  Pete suspects the whole liner is coated with tar and if we light it, best case scenario is that the whole house smells like a tarmacing team, worst case is that it ignites and we get a chimney fire above the blanking plate that’s completely inaccessible and burns the house down.  One swift call to the agency later, it’s been removed from the advertising as a feature and all guests contacted to explain the situation.  The solution is to get the chimneys harled, which can’t be done until the weather settles down, so we’re probably looking at end of April/beginning of May at the earliest.  In the meantime, Pete will come and remove the stove to clean everything down and then we’ll put newspaper or rags above the blanking plate to catch any drips, replacing with fresh at each changeover.  I really wish he’d been able to come back and see this BEFORE we started advertising, but hey ho.

It was third time lucky for BT on Tuesday afternoon, in that the engineer did turn up and fitted the master socket in the house.  Jamie from Openreach was also in the village, trying to track down a fault on our line at home which has developed a really bad crackle and intermittent broadband.  The engineer found a fault on the line at Ethel’s as well and the two of them put their heads together and worked out that it was a problem in the big 50-pair cable on the main road, somewhere between the farm and the farm cottage.  They’ve had a number of complaints in the village and this should now allow BT to link them all together and get fixing the cable bumped up the priority list.  It was supposed to be done yesterday, but thanks to the large dumping of snow, we’ve still got a crackly line.  However, hats off to BT, I got another two engineers at lunchtime today and by 1pm they’d got the phone and broadband at Ethel’s up and running for me.

Yesterday and today have been a serious case of stop it and tidy up, and I underestimated how long it was going to take.  I got the bedrooms sorted pretty quickly, they just needed a dust and a hoover, ditto for the landing and stairs.  I cleaned the bathroom, stocked the bathroom unit with loo rolls, got Mick to put the bathroom mirror up and then emptied both the cupboards under the stairs and gave them a really good scrub out, as they were absolutely filthy.  Setting up the kitchen was the big time sink.  There was a serious amount of packaging to deal with – this is just from the crockery!

The guests were coming up from Angus and I wasn’t entirely sure they were going to make it, as for most of the day the snow gates on the A9 were shut and we were completely cut off from the rest of the country.  When I checked my email at about 2.15 to find a message timed an hour earlier saying they were just 80 miles away, I had a slight panic, because the kitchen at that point looked like this:

One very focused hour later, I was just about there.  (And yes, I did remember to put the dog water bowl on the floor!)

It’s almost exactly two years since we got the keys and just as a reminder of how much we’ve done, this is what the kitchen looked like on day one, shot taken of the same back wall.

Our guests made it to the village about 5pm – Mick had just got home and we spotted a car driving slowly along the village road, stopping at each driveway.  I thought that had to be them, so Mick ran up the drive and it was.  He gave them directions, told them to ring or come and see us if there was anything they needed, and so far we haven’t had a screaming guest at the back door demanding a refund, so hopefuly that means they’re happy with the place 🙂

Racing for the line

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I had an email today from our first guest!  Thanks to a bit of a booking mix-up, she actually wanted to stay 1st to 5th March instead of 4th to 8th – would it be possible to swap?  I said yes, but warned her we might not be completely 100% finished with the landscaping, which she was fine with, and then went into full on strategic planning mode!

Fortunately Mick has done an amazing job this week.  At the start of the week, the bathroom still looked like a building site.  This is what it looked like this afternoon:

All that’s left to do is seal round the shower, grout the slates on the windowsill and swap the plastic toilet seat for the oak one we bought, the rest is just set dressing.

Jeff, our heating engineer and plumber, came to have a look at the basin, which had a small leak somewhere (it turned out to be spiralling down the thread of the u-bend) and service the boiler.  I have never before in my life seen a man take a boiler to pieces and then hoover cobwebs out of the various components!  It’s now testing at 94% efficiency, which is excellent for its age, and should last at least another year.  We did have a chuckle when we realised we’d both turned up in the same outfit 😉

The weather has been beautiful today, so along with helping me take a big bale of hay down to the horses and bringing the sheep up to Ethel’s, using the little garden gate as a shedder to separate out the ones having twins, keeping them up here for feeding and putting the rest back out on the point, Mick has been sorting out the front garden.  Ever since the gravel went down, the gate has dragged on the ground and it’s been difficult to locate the hole for the bolt, so a few inches has been sawn off the bottom of the gate, the bolt moved up and a stone set in the ground with a hole drilled in it.  It now all works perfectly.

All the grass has been strimmed back.  The centre section is going to be a patio area made from the old flags that were outside the front door.  The grassy area to the left was going to be where we rebuilt Ethel’s rock garden, but it’s a much bigger area, so the rock garden is being used to edge round both grass sections and then I’m going to sow wildflower seeds in both bits when the weather warms up and try and get a sort of wildflower meadow effect going, with poppies and cornflowers and ox-eye daisies and so on.  Fairly low maintenance in that it just gets strimmed back once the flowers have set seed!

I’ve been inside, working on door frames.  David had to plane them back to get the doors to fit properly which, of course, took the white paint off, so I’ve been carefully repainting them and using several miles of masking tape in an effort not to paint any oak or hinges.  They’re all done and I’ve touched up all the spots the roller missed on the bedroom and living room walls.  I’m off south tomorrow to see (a) Erasure at the Hammersmith Apollo and (b) my mum 🙂 so Mick has been left with a short list of things from my snagging list that are jobs he is far better at than I am, and the rest I should be able to get done Monday to Wednesday next week.  I desperately need Pete to come and commission the woodburner as at the moment it still has a bucket behind it, and David needs to come back for another look at the door he built for the understairs cupboard – the flipping underfloor heating has warped it and it won’t shut, so I can’t paint it until it’s sorted!

Fingernail-biting time

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So we did make an appointment to view inside house number 4, Mick took a half day last Friday and we spent an hour having a really good look around it.  The executor was up visiting friends and family, so showed us round herself, a really lovely lady.  It was her aunt’s house, which she’d bought in 1976 as a kind of insurance policy against being asked to leave her family croft if either of her two older brothers came home and showed an interest in taking it over.  They didn’t and so she stayed on the croft, with the house remaining mostly empty apart from the odd family holiday week and an occasional prayer meeting in the living room.  She eventually moved into it in 2013, when she started to need more regular care visits and the house was more accessible for carers than the croft, which was down an unmade-up track.  After two years there, she was moved to the local care home.  For a house that’s been mainly empty for the past 42 years, it’s in pretty good shape, though it does need a fair bit of work.

We got home, had a good chat through it and decided to go for it.  Cumberland, who does holiday let mortgages, had a look at the details and said that sadly it needed too much work for them to lend on it, but they’d be happy to do so once renovations were complete.  I found a bridging loan company who would lend me up to 60% of the value of Ethel’s plus this one, but it would have been at 1.25% a MONTH and they wanted all the interest and fees taken out up front which (a) totalled over £20,000 for 9 months and (b) wouldn’t have left us with enough to get the renovations done.  After a lot of calculator-bashing I realised that if we did it as a buy-to-let instead of a holiday let, then the Ecology Building Society might be able to help – they specialise in lending on houses with the potential for energy improvements and since the EPC graded it F, there was certainly plenty we could do on that front, so I gave them a ring at the start of the week and then went through things in more detail with a mortgage advisor yesterday morning.

The upshot of that call was that they’re happy to lend me up to £96,000 or 80% of the purchase price, whichever is lower, subject to completing a full application form and providing proof of income for us both.  I’d also been in touch with Cumberland about taking a mortgage on Ethel’s and after a few questions, they also got back to me yesterday afternoon to say we could borrow £100,000 as long as we used some of it to pay off the remaining 0% credit card debt from renovating Ethel’s and could get Scottish Cottages to write us a letter confirming expected income was more than £7,500 net of commission.  At 4.45pm I got through to the selling agent and, after a discussion with them about where to start negotiations, made an offer.

We’ll see what happens, I have a good feeling about this house, and it was 10 years ago on 14th February that our offer on the house we live in was accepted, so I’m hoping this is an auspicious time of year for house-buying for us!  To take my mind off things, I’ve been busying away down the road.  The hall is now completely painted and the knocks on the stair skirting touched up.  Just the cupboard doors to go on, lampshade to fit, sockets to be screwed in and coat rack to be purchased and put up opposite the bottom of the stairs.

I’ve also touched up the scrapes in the kitchen and painted over the plasterboard cut-out round the extractor.  You can tell that something’s been done there (the paint was still wet when I took this) but I think that’s sufficiently disguised not to need anything putting over it.

For comparison:

I painted the new wood frame around the bathroom window bay and, despite being very careful not to press the masking tape down too hard and removing it slowly as soon as the paint was dry to touch, a load of grey paint peeled off, so today’s first job is to sort that out!

David has been making doors for me in his workshop at home, one for the cupboard next to the bathroom and two for the byres outside, so I must drop him a text today and see when he’s coming back to fit them.  Mick has taken next week off so we can have a big blitz and get everything finished.  My to-do list is still looking frighteningly unticked, but I cheered myself up yesterday by realising that more than a third of the items on it simply involve buying something and putting it in the correct room.  I shall crack on with that as soon as my cashback credit card ticks over to a new statement period in the next couple of days!

Pay day!

by In Ethel's House, Holiday letting, Renovations Tagged , , , , 1 Comment

Excuse me while I jump up and down and whoop a bit, because when I checked my business account today I saw that £75 had been deposited yesterday, which is 3 x £25 deposits from our first three bookings 🙂  We get the balance month-end before the stay, so at the end of February I’ll get the balance of the 3-day stay booked for March less the annual property registration fee of £105.  We’ve also had another week booked for September.

I had an answerphone message from BT on Monday telling me that the engineer would be visiting again on Wednesday 31st January and please could I be in from 8am until 1pm?  The line was a bit crackly, so I double-checked with BT’s Live Chat who confirmed the engineer was booked.  I’d picked up some new plaster, so was able to get those last few screw heads and plasterboard joins filled in, but confidently expecting that BT wouldn’t let me down twice in a row, I hadn’t taken down much else to get on with, and I couldn’t carry on painting the hall over wet plaster.  So I made a big snagging list (it runs to three pages):

And I discovered that my phone talks to the TV as they’re both Samsungs.  I can throw my phone screen to the TV or put the TV screen on my phone, and if you put the phone screen on the TV and then switch the camera on, you get this:

(Can you tell I was slightly bored by this stage??)

Anyway, no-one showed up again, so I stomped back down the road, and at 1.12pm an email pinged in saying they were continuing to work on my line installation and would contact me with further information on 5th February – at which point I was so icily polite to Live Chat that they opened a complaint without me asking them to!

Today I’ve been re-doing the screw heads in the plasterboard, because the first lot of plaster shrank a bit, and then decided to have a go at sorting out the hole David had to cut in the plasterboard to put in some stud to attach the extractor hood to.  I mean, plastering a wall around a freshly installed extractor over brand new hob and wood worktop, what could possibly go wrong??  I did the sensible thing and got a sheet and some masking tape.

And amazingly managed not to make too much of a mess!  The nice thing about this paint, annoying as it was to apply, is that all its claims about being washable are true.  Once I’d plastered around the cut-out line and filled in the screw heads, I was able to wipe it over with a J-cloth and take most of the excess plaster off.

(Those three little dots are nail holes, I have no idea how they got there.)  I’m not 100% certain I’m going to be able to cover it up properly, but I’ll sand it tomorrow and then see how well it takes another coat of paint.  I need to get rid of David’s pencil marks as well.  If it doesn’t look good then we’ll go back to the original idea of getting some brushed metal cut to size and attach it to the wall.

Another month gone

by In Ethel's House, Projects, Renovations Tagged , , , , Leave a comment

I have 31 days left until we’re officially open for business, which is really quite astonishingly scary.  BT was supposed to come this week (although on Wednesday, not Thursday as I wrote in my last post) and even phoned me on Monday to remind me to be at the house for the engineer.  I got there just before 1pm, took the lid off the plaster ready to fill in the remaining plasterboard screw holes in the hall from when David had to make the door into the kitchen smaller, and found that it was (a) solid and (b) mouldy.  So I masked off the front door and the skirting boards and was happily slapping a base coat of white matt emulsion over the walls that didn’t need filling while listening to Judge Rinder and Escape To The Country (I do like having the TV working down there).

Escape To The Country finished, so 4pm and still no engineer.  I’d run out of things to paint, took my overalls off, sat on the sofa and played backgammon on my phone for a bit.  At 5pm I saw headlights, which got my hopes up temporarily, but it was Mick home from work and come to see what was happening.  He went home and let the dogs out and I stayed until 5.55pm when I decided the engineer probably wasn’t coming, went home and got straight onto Live Chat with BT.  They were extremely apologetic – apparently there’s an issue at the exchange which meant my line couldn’t be connected that day and they weren’t expecting an update until 5th February.  They’re going to compensate me for the missed appointment, I didn’t ask them to, it was offered automatically, and I’ve asked them to make sure that I won’t be billed for the line and broadband until it’s actually installed and working, because my first bill is supposed to generate on 3rd February.

Dougie has been back, fitting ethernet and TV sockets in the bedrooms, along with the outside lights and finishing off a few things in the kitchen.  The oven needs an inline 15amp fuse, which isn’t standard and he’s had to order, and when he opened the box for the weatherproof outdoor switch (we have two outside lights which will illuminate the back garden and the sheep fank) it turned out to be a socket, so that has to be changed, but we do now have the under-unit lighting working in the kitchen and it looks great – the spots in there are very bright, but these give the perfect amount of light for eating supper round the table.

Mick has been working in the bathroom all weekend.  For a man who claims to hate tiling, he’s really very good at it.  Shower screen up and shower fitted next weekend, we hope.

Finally, as we’re supplying all logs, peat and kindling for our guests, we thought we’d better get cracking on with our woodpile.  We got it delivered free because it came out of Strathy Forest when they were felling for the windfarm, which is only three miles away, so it’s been lying in the field for a few years while the sap dries.  Now Euan is turning it all into woodburner-sized chunks for us, so we can cart them down the road and stack them in the big barn to finish drying.  Jack is inspecting progress here!