Finding Enough

A very tardy update this month, as September has turned out to be very eventful (in a good way), but more about that next month – or in a couple of weeks.

August started in fairly unremarkable fashion. I carried on with the cement stripping and re-pointing the gable end of the house, we spent a lot of time outside with the vegetable garden in full flow after a slow start to the year, and it was time for the local agricultural show again. This year I volunteered to help out on the beekeepers association stand, so I got in for free, wore a bee suit all day and talked to a lot of people about bees, but saw less of the rest of the show.

The poultry classes returned after a break of a few years because of bird flu. I was amazed how many weird and wonderful types of chicken existed in this quiet corner of Scotland. Then of course there was the very serious business of the champion of champions trophy. This year there were 3 chickens competing against 11 sheep, 7 cows, 2 horses and a goat. Once again a coo triumphed (not a typo, a Scottish cow 😉) – a black bull this year.

A quiet start to the month was a good thing, as we had planned family visits for the middle of the month. As usual, this involved a couple of weeks and a grand tour of England heading down one side to Mr W’s parents and across to my family and back up the other, with a few catch ups with friends along the way. The morning we left we discovered a flat tyre. Luckily, it was a relatively slow leak and we were able to pump it up before we left and take our tyre inflator with us for a quick top up every 3hrs or so.

My mother in law did a sterling job of organising her mobile tyre guy to arrive at 9am the following morning with 4 new tyres of the correct spec. We knew 3 tyres were going to need replacing soon anyway and had planned to do it before the winter, so we opted to change all 4 together now. What could have been a big disruption to the start of our trip was dealt with relatively painlessly. Even the cost was expected, just brought forward a little.

Our circumnavigation of the country coincided with 34 deg temperatures, which was a bit of a divergence from the 22 degrees we left at home. It really felt like being on holiday, and it was a welcome change not thinking about DIY and actually being able to wear clean clothes! With lots of socialising comes a lot of eating and drinking out and the inevitable hit on the expenses, I’m expecting increased spending this month, even before we include the renovation spending. We did limit who we told that we would be around. It’s always a difficult balance. The point of the trip is to spend time with family, and not be out every night meeting up with friends. We have found it simplest just to keep visits a secret from most people.

We squeezed in a visit to the agricultural show of my childhood in Dorset and the contrast with our local show was obvious. The focus was much more on the retail side of things, rather than the livestock – although there were still some cows, sheep, horses and chickens. My 5 year old niece was delighted by the inclusion of a fun fair and insisted I had my first ride on a ferris wheel since I was a teenager.

The day after we returned home, we found out we had been successful securing funding for energy efficiency improvements. Because of our awful EPC rating, rural location and oil fired heating we fell into the right category, but weren’t sure we’d be successful. I had a run in with a terrible company last year, who we wouldn’t have wanted to work with, even if they would adapt their standard offering to leave out the internal wall insulation in all the wrong materials for our old stone house (they wouldn’t). I was aware a new round of funding had been released from all the adverts suddenly appearing online. I contacted a local installer and asked if their offering could be tailored. Their approach seems to be, as long as they can get paid by the scheme, they will do what ever we want. In order for them to get paid they need to raise our EPC at least 2 bands, and to do so they “just keep throwing more solar panels at it”. Fine by us. When we finally got the call, the installers wanted to start a week later on 1st September!

It was a busy week preparing for their arrival. We basically had to move out, so they could access all the areas they needed to. In order for them to do a tidy job, we also had to do quite a lot of prep work. We chose to remove plasterboard and ancient disintegrating rockwool we didn’t want just covered over upstairs, and lifted a floor to keep central heating pipe runs as inobtrusive as possible downstairs. It was certainly a manic time, like moving house and a big DIY project in the same week. We also had to do some fast research on domestic battery storage, so we could have that installed at the same time as the grant-funded work, in order to benefit from an upgraded inverter (we just had to pay the difference from a standard inverter). Remember that shepherd’s hut in the garden we showered in when we had no hot water? We’re now living in it.

I’ll share more detail and photos next month, but there isn’t a single room that isn’t currently in dismantled in some way. We are so lucky to have the shepherd’s hut to hide in and some outbuildings to store furniture and belongings in. I have no idea how people manage to live in their property through this kind of work.

While we were on holiday, we had been aware of stock market increases, so were anticipating a bit of a boost this month, but in the end the impact wasn’t quite as much as were were expecting. Still more than our spending without renovation costs, so no complaints. I think if we had updated a couple of days earlier, the numbers would have been rosier still, but it’s an arbitrary number for tracking purposes only, so not really important.

Freedom fund value – £1,407,272 (up nearly 5k on last month)

Expenditure – £9,734.68 (or a 8.3% withdrawal rate) including renovation costs, or £3,805.48 (or a 3.24% withdrawal rate) without renovation costs

Earned income – £0

Still no payment for my consultancy work in April, so if it hasn’t materialised by the end of the month, I’ll ask my friend, who put me in contact in the first place, to give the finance team a nudge. They’re quite high up in the organisation internationally, so hopefully will get things moving in October.

As anticipated, our total expenses were very high in August. This was mainly due to the 80% deposit we paid on the home energy batteries, totalling £5,179. We also paid £630 to building control to sign off the structural work we did back in February & March. We also bought a second hand electric cooker for £120 to have something to cook on when the Rayburn was taken out (frustratingly, a month after it was serviced). It took a bit of cleaning, but has come up as good as new.

The elevated spending outside renovation costs was not only due to a lot of eating and drinking out, although we did spend £380 in August. We had the Rayburn serviced (£240) and the septic tank emptied (also £240) at home. We also splashed out on a beautiful cow hide rug at one of the many retail opportunities at the Dorset show (£300). It’ll look great on the flagstone floor we haven’t laid yet…….. There was also travel spending for half of a Lakes District cottage for a week with friends in Sept and £194 pre-booking a trip for a holiday later in the year (I will get half of the latter back from other friends in due course).

With so much going on some of my non-financial goals were put a bit on the back burner this month.

Reduce plastic waste by making one change every month – This has definitely not been the focus in the last few weeks. A local dairy has started deliveries to our postcode in glass bottles, but there always seems to be a reason not to start yet. September is shaping up to be a slip backwards on this front, as convenience temporarily overtakes the desire to reduce waste, whilst glamping in the garden.

Do something creative every month – I did manage to squeeze in a workshop with the local artists group I joined last year. We learnt how to make ink from plants and flowers. The range of colours you can achieve is surprisingly varied and it was a great social morning. I brought home a couple of small bottles of ink I made as well as a dehydrated one in a shell. Such a simple way of storing it and a lovely use of a readily available natural material. Sadly my new inks were stashed away in my studio space just as it was filled with all the furniture displaced from the house, so it’ll be a while before I see it again.

Record the birds and mammals spotted around the house each month – Whilst I did make notes in August when we were at home, I have absolutely no idea where the book is now, and won’t be seeing it again until we move back into the house, so September will be a miss too. I did have a conversation with someone much more knowledgeable than me about pine martens. For those who are interested, the wound on the back of the female’s neck in July is much more likely to be the result of mating than any kind of attack. I am glad I’m not a pine marten.

………and finally, I’ll leave you with a little video of our ‘shepherds hut tv’. I think we’re a human zoo for the birds as much as they are entertainment for us.