Steel Kitten

Going backwards with the gas bill

 

I made a lot of preparations last year for our goal of rebuilding a racing car, all aimed at reducing the household bills and general spending. I purchased a halogen oven back at the beginning of October with the intention of cutting back our gas usage, but until recently I didn't know how much it would actually save.

Now I do :-)

Before I tell you, the Halogen oven cannot claim all the credit for what follows, as we had an unseasonally warm autumn and our heating didn't go on for around three weeks after what we normally would, but I think it has contributed a large amount of the saving.

Between October 15th and January 20th we have used...drumroll please...388 units, a drop of around 200 units over the same period last year. That equates to us using 35% less gas - which is brilliant - and a gas bill of £187 pounds for three months. The electricity bill has also come in and as expected it has increased due to the halogen oven and unexpectedly having to run a fan heater and an oil heater this winter for a couple of days to heat up areas of the house where pipes froze (yes, the water in the washing machine pipes is still freezing in cold weather!). However, it has only increased by around £20, which I'm happy with. Given the recent price rises and the use of expensive fanheaters etc I was expecting a lot more.

Will keep you posted how we get on with this goal for the rest of the year. My hope is that after 12 months our savings will pay us back the original cost of the oven, cover the increase in electricity running it and still leave us with some money to spare afterwards.

Beware the lure of free kindle books

Oh Dee Cee what have you started?!

A couple of weeks ago DeeCee commented about kindles and how amazon has a discussion board which features a post with free kindle books every day.

Beginning of the end really!

Every day I go on there and download the most interesting non-fiction books I can find. I now have in excess of 70 free books. Some I'm glad I didn't pay money for and some are just fantastic.

If you have a kindle and don't know about this place yet you can click here and go straight to it.

Also, last night I found this site with free kindle books and unlike the kindle forum you can search by genre and filter to get the newest. At the moment there are over 1500 books on there.

Be careful though, free ebooks are addictive! While I was writing this post I downloaded another 10 books - six on various cooking recipes and four on financial matters. 

Any ideas what this is?

 

I was turning another compost pile yesterday and I found this perfect circular hole when I accidently sliced a hard clay crust off it.

I've been wracking my brains trying to work out what made it? Can't be a mouse, rat or hedgehog - it's too big and it's very damp and cold. There are individual indents on the wall (bites?) and a pattern on the underside of the crust almost like - well - something has regurgitated the mud.

That just left me with toads really and I found a couple of likely candidates further into the pile. So, hopefully them being the originators of the little damp nest and potential parents, I left that area without turning it, re-made a cap for the top on top of some twigs as a scaffold leaving a small hole to enter and leave it, then placed the two of them about 6 inches apart orientated towards it and covered them up. 

Hope they weren't two boys...and that it wasn't someone else's hole.

Ooops. 

EDITED TO ADD 24/1 - it does belong to someone else!! It's an old wasp nest! Poor toads...

Anyway, willow. I decided to have another bed, a much larger one this time. I planted two beds last year and one bed failed. All but one plant died, which I think was due to two conifer trees about 6 feet away which were probably using all the available water and nutrients.

This time, I'm going to do an extended bed on the site of the old chicken pen...

I was going to grow potatoes there, but then I realised that potatoes are so cheap now that it wouldn't be worth my while growing them. I'm better off growing some of the more expensive fruit and veg we eat. So instead I'll plant the willow there. 

I have a few leftover whips I can take two foot cuttings from, plus when I trim the main willow supports of my willow fence there'll be around 3 to feet from each of those, so there's plenty of new willow cuttings to plant. Hopefully that will be next weekend, althought the building of this might get in the way!

Yes, we started on the greenhouse today and found out it is 11-sided, not 10-sided, and because of this is actually fits around all of the fruit bushes! I'm still not 100% convinced I will leave the fruit bushes in,as it cuts down the space for growing tomatoes, but the grape vine will stay in and be trained into the roof space in a way that lets light in and its tendrils can get good air ventilation.

A halogen oven instead of a cardi

 

I had a decision to make last Thursday.

I had earmarked £50 in my clothing budget to update my office wardrobe for winter. Now, I have to admit that last year’s winter office clothes are a tad on the tight side due to my eyes being bigger than belly recently, so I thought maybe I could do a few adjustments to zips and buttons, get a couple of cheap tops and then do a bit of a cover up job with a new long cardigan! That was before I went over to Cottage Smallholder for a mooch early one morning and saw Andrew.

‘Andrew’ is Danny and Fiona’s Halogen cooker (it’s an Andrew James model hence the name). I’d seen him before and been considering getting a halogen oven for about 10 months, but I wasn’t happy with the enormous prices for them – around £90-£120. I’m absolutely convinced of their moneysaving nature – they cook fast and because of this they cost less to run, especially when it comes to gas which is more expensive than electricity.  But the cost for me was prohibitive, and I wasn’t overly happy with only having a 12 month guarantee.

Then I read Fiona and Danny’s updated blog post about them buying a new halogen oven recently and how good value ‘Andrew’ was at the moment. I clicked through the link on their blog to Amazon to see the halogen oven I wanted with spare bulb, cooking accessories and a two year guarantee for the princely sum of £39. I was in there like a rat up a drainpipe. The postage was a bit steep, but still. Just shy of £50 and two days later ‘Hal’ arrived for me to play with. And I haven’t stopped playing since.

All thoughts of winter clothing were forgotten. I haven’t used my gas stove for a main meal since last Friday evening, although I did use some gas to quickly cook up some pasta last night and veg on Sunday (veg can take a ridiculous a mount of time in a halogen cooker so it's easier and quicker to cook them in other ways). But otherwise, scampi and chips, onion rings, bacon and eggs, roast chicken and potatoes, mexican bean burgers, steak and kidney pie, and an apple and cinnamon bake have all been cooked in Hal so far. He's defrosted and heated up chillis, bologneses and soups straight from the freezer and even has a self-washing facility – a few drops of washing up liquid and a couple of inches of water and Hal’s away.

Fiona and Danny have a fan oven and managed to shave 25% off their electric bill - I’m aiming for reduction of 10-15% on our gas bill this winter. And a reduction of half a stone in weight to be comfortable in my winter wardrobe from last year ;-))

Live like you're skint when you're not

 

A perfect advocado - ripe, ready to eat and 65% less money than it was. Better than the full price hard tennis balls you normally get stuck with.

If I had to come up with the one thing that Martin and I do that makes a massive difference to our personal finances, this would be it:

"We live like we're skint when we're not."

For us to pay off the mortgage, for Martin to retire early, for me to retire early, means we have to have a surplus of cash in our accounts month after month after month to throw at the mortgage and to save for what we want instead of taking on debt. The expenses have to go down, the income has to go up, and it has to stay that way on a consistent basis. 

We've crunched the numbers, we know how much we need to live on once the mortgage is paid off and we know getting there is going to be a hard old slog, especially for Martin as he has a manual job, but you know what? It's a hard old slog living day-to-day anyway so we might as well have a big goal to aim for to make it all worthwhile.

Living below your means takes a huge amount of discipline and focus, perhaps even more than being really skint because you know you have the money and you have to fight the temptation to buy stuff all the time. You have to impose your own limits, which the little devil on your shoulder then spends all month trying to wear you down over. When you're really skint, you don't spend. You have bank account limits that you can't go past so when you don't have the money, you don't have the money. The devil is still there, but you are scared of going over a limit and being charged for it so you can ignore the devil. For the most part ;-)

So most of the time Martin and I pretend we’re skint, and that slows down the flow of money leaving the house, along with a few other things we do:

1. Bulk buying – if we know we’ll eat it/use it and it’s on offer, we get a few of them and stash the rest.
2. Use up leftovers – either take them for lunch the next day, freeze them for another day, or make them part of the next night’s dinner. 
3. Cook more at once and freeze the surplus – if we have to cook it, we cook more and stash the rest for another day’s meal
4. Use slow cookers and halogen cookers – they use less energy, we can cook more, and we can have dinner ready when we walk in the door
5. Make takeaways a treat – instead of takeaways because we’re knackered, we make them a treat to celebrate the end of the working week.
6. Grow a few veggies, the odd pot of herbs. It sometimes makes for a simple evening meal
7. Forget brands – we shop around and find non-branded foods that we like. Because we all know that supermarkets pay brand manufacturers to put their products in supermarket own brand packaging, don't we...?
8. Learnt to joint a chicken – for the same price as a pack of 2 chicken breasts we buy a whole chicken and have the legs, wings and everything else for ‘rubber chicken’ menu planning. 
9. Use coupons, vouchers and discount codes where necessary – it’s a no-brainer. That’s like leaving money on the table.
10. If we go to a supermarket, we swing past the clearance sections first – the food is usually one or two days before it’s use by date, and is still good. Go at the right time and we pay half the cost and freeze most of what we buy. This will be changing soon due to the abolition of sell by dates so I may have to go back to the drawing board on this one.
11. Pack your own food on journeys - if we go anywhere, we take our own food and drink. I have to be surgically detached from my flasks.
12. Minimal subscriptions – I’ve whittled our automated subscriptions down to almost nothing. We do not have Sky any more. Magazine subscriptions get bought as presents for us for Christmas and birthdays. We don’t do Lovefilm. We don’t do gyms. We have PAYG phones. I hate seeing lines of automatic debits on my bank statement now.
13. Accept a little inconvenience for the long term gain - Martin and I work 4 minutes drive from one another, but we start 2 hours apart. In order to avoid buying and running a second car, I leave the house at the same time as Martin and get to work two hours early (or get to a local hotel if the office isn’t open). Although he finishes 2-3 hours earlier than me, he comes to pick me up. Even though he does this journey back to my work from home to pick me up, this is still cheaper than me finishing my driving lessons and running a second car for the almost identical 30 minute journey. It’s not convenient granted, but it saves a hell of a lot of money. We're talking hundreds of pounds a month.

But with all things in life you have to have balance:

• It’s proper Marmite all the way in this house and always will be.
• Diito ginger beer - has to be Old Jamaican.
• I still buy ‘country house and garden’s style magazines. It used to be two a month. Now I’m down to one or some months none at all, but I agonise terribly at the magazine rack if I go there. Best to walk straight past without looking.
• I use 4711 eau de cologne in my ironing water and a few drops in my washing.
• Whenever I have to travel by train I buy a large latte at the coffee kiosk at the station.
• I have a Bounty addiction. The chocolate bar, not the kitchen roll.
• I use Chanel foundation. 
• Every now and then for very special occasions, I save up and have a splurge on a couple of bottles of vintage champagne. 

 Living like you're skint when you're not will give you the cash you need to do many things in your life.

1. To pay off debt
2. To pay off the mortgage early
3. To save for something special
4. To give up full-time work
5. To retire early

It may not be a fashionable thing to do, and some people may not be understanding when you decline to go out one evening for an impromptu meal and spend £50-£75. They may not understand the connection between that one meal and you retiring or paying off your mortgage, but when you add up all the things and events that you felt under pressure to spend money on due to others' expectations, that's a lot of money over the years. And those people are not going to be feeling your pain when you're still slogging away at 65 are they?

A watchful companion

I was getting ready for winter today and focusing on one of my Urgent and Important tasks - getting the remaining woodpile into the dry. A couple of months ago I cut up a about a third of the woodpile using a circular saw and stuffed the bunker full. Then all the remaining lovely dry wood sat in the rain for a while. 

Rather than spend hours doing that again, I roughly cut and stacked all the wood on our remaining woodpile in the shed to keep dry until it was needed.

I was halfway though when I was aware I was being watched. Two small, beady curious little eyes followed my every move from high corner of the shed. 

I had disturbed it's happy home. I could tell it was happy by the extent to which it had made its way through one of the pears!

Move out mousy. It's my shed. 

Junk rummaging again

We went to do our annual car boot sale this morning. We know when it's time to do it because the weight of junk in the loft starts to create feather cracks in the bedroom ceilings!

I know we were supposed to be raking in the money, but as soon as Martin was taking it I was off round the back of the car spending it. Not all of it, I wasn't that naughty, but it was the first car boot sale I'd been to in months and I couldn't sit still. I didn't spend more than £10 and managed to restrain myself to just a few items:

The Road to Nab End and Return to Nab End by William Woodruff, I've wanted to read the story of this Northern lad's upbringing in Blackburn in the early 1900s for a while, so I'm really pleased I found these for £1.

Two butter paddles 20p

A sweet little cushion £1

Box sets of the Flambards, which I'm going to put onto DVD £1

A book on Natural Beauty 10p; a few interesting recipes for natural shampoos.

How to Make a Cottage Garden 10p

A pair of Fair-Isle style fingerless gloves 50p

These two nice pieces of wool fabric....

...which unfortunately came with this lot as well which I'm not overly keen on. £1.

On the plus side, we managed to get rid of almost two thirds of a carful of junk - 50% of that sold, about 25% went to the tip and the rest will go to the charity shop on Monday. 

So finally we can get up into the attic now!

Shelters as sheds

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So I'm on the phone to my friend Charlotte and Martin walks by laughing in a guilty way.

"Why are you laughing?"

"No reason."

"So why are you laughing then?"

He laughs again, looks towards the house then pulls a face. Now I'm worried. Has he eaten all of the chocolate muffins I made this morning?

"I'm going in to see what you've done."

"You might not want to..."

Now I'm really worried. Has he broken a bottle of perfume or something? Smashed a mirror? Blocked the toilet? What? WHAT?

"...I've bought two air raid shelters."

"Huh?" OK, I wasn't expecting that.

"I've bought two air raid shelters. For £11 each."

Yes...my husband while left unsupervised for a few minutes decided to have a punt on two 1940s air raid shelters on ebay and won the auction. That's them in the picture above currently operating as sheds in the current owners garden. 

I'm feigning annoyance but he knows me too well. Deep down, he knows I'm chuffed to bits. ROFL!

Getting crafty for...er...er...

I'm crafting like mad, but I can't show you any of it. Well, I can show you enticing snippets. It's for the Big C you see. I don't want to say the word because it irritates people saying it so early, and I'm one of the people who throw a fit in shops when I see C cards several months early.

But when you're making homemade gifts, you can't just throw it all together in December. You have to be organised and start early.

Which is why I was sat with Martin's glasses perched on my nose last night peering at a stitchery for an hour. I could use a bigger count of AIDA, but I like my stitcheries to have lots of detail which tends to get lost the bigger your stitches are.

 

So for a while, my lips are sealed. *Shock horror* How often does that happen?

***

I've added some more cherries to the cushion and now I don't like it (especially since Fleagle has found it and covered it with hair)

I wasn't convinced with the first lot and now I'm even less convinced with them all on there. They just look plain weird, all regimented and peculiar. But it's no good asking a perfectionist to put cherries on a cushion randomly. Do you know I even stitched the cherries into place so they wouldn't flap around randomly. Sad, very sad. Control freakery gone nuts.

So they're coming off. Crochet flowers will replace. When I've learnt to do crochet flowers that is.Or maybe a spot of stitchery should go on there.....we'll see.

***

Two recent snuffles from a car boot sale:

Martin asked in hushed tones what sago was and did it have anything to do with tapioca. I've never met a man with a more pathological hatred of tapioca. And fishcakes. I sense perhaps my MIL may have force fed him with the two while he was growing up and he now has psychological scarring.

I feel that way sometimes about Ready Brek.

Lovely, but barmy

Work has been barmy lately. Lovely, but barmy. The 60-page website morphed into an 80-page and I managed to get it to 3rd draft stage in just over three weeks. The client is over the moon so I'm a happy bunny too, but it did mean that all I've done for weeks is work. I've seen far too may 5am starts and 12am finishes. 

Still...a few things have happened that I want to share.

1) I had a house guest. My niece - fashionista and fan of all things vampire - came to stay for a week (hee hee, she's going to kill me when she sees this picture!).

She very graciously accepted an uncomfortable blow up bed on the floor of my hobby room, the latter of which disappeared under a storm of clothing and shoes as all girls' bedrooms do at that age. In fact mine still does and I'm more than twice her age. She had a go at sewing. She sniffed through my bookshelves. She got to squeeze the chickens and feed them naughty things. She cooked her own food.

She left behind this hideously squeezed tube of tomato paste that I felt obliged to try and straighten out and squeeze neatly from the bottom. I failed. The tube was too far gone. These damn fist grippers - they drive us neat bottom squeezers mad ;-))

2) My leeks got planted...finally. I heard them whisper their thanks as they eased their cramped and starved roots into the moist fertile soil.

3) The lavender and buddleia in Zone 1 got a stay of execution. They were due to be ripped out and replaced with a design I had planned about 18 months ago based on dwarf Thumbelina lavender and standard roses, but the bees and the butterflies were going mad for them. I've never seen so many feeding at once -I counted around 30 butterflies one morning. To hell with the Zone work that week. In the end I left everything alone for nature to enjoy.

4) Martin and I were forced to clear the back of the kitchen garden in a hurry yesterday when this cute little girl was found out in daylight choking to death with bindweed wrapped around her throat.

She weighed 450g, so she's not Fozzie or Gonzo. She's definitely a spring baby, but whether she came from our girls or the existing mother we don't know. After a bowl of beef cat food and a good day's sleep under fleeces in a box in our bathroom, she was released into the garden at dusk the same day.The last thing we saw was her little spiky bum wriggling at high speed into long grass by the compost heap.

5) Finally, Martin and I attacked the fireplace today to replace a broken throat lintel, which guides the smoke up the chimney and provides support for the bricks above the gap. It suddenly fell into the grate last winter and you can see how badly the smoke has damaged the wallpaper as it escaped up behind the mantlepiece without the lintel to guide it.

Just as an afterthought, I cleaned up the soot with sugar soap. That led to giving the chimney breast a lick of white paint...

...which unexpectedly morphed into a paint job on the alcoves on either side of the fireplace because suddenly I passionately hated the previous owner's choice of colour (orange) and happened to have a tin of Ecos organic paint in Zucchini under the stairs and a paintbrush to hand...

...and then I brought in my favourite painting by New York artist Albert Camurati. This is an original oil and was commissioned by someone at great expense for their kitchen.

Quite why the former owner chose to put it into an auction, where I paid the staggering sum of £3 (and got an ink sketch by the same artist thrown in), is still unknown. I know the former owner was gutted because he stopped me afterwards on the way out of the auction hall to tell me about the painting and sketch, and he looked gutted. I'm sure he thought they would go for more money. But not many people are interested in veggie pictures.

It's not painted yet behind the TV - that happens tomorrow when we'll be pulling the TV out to sort out some of the cables...and of course we have a huge amount of tidying away still to do as evidenced by the amazing amount of belongings crammed into that side of the room!

Now of course the rest of the room looks shabby, so this week I'll make my way slowly round it replacing the magnolia walls with fresh white paint. This room is due a major overhaul next year, but until then this will do.

I love spontaneous painting. Great fun.