Bog Roll :: stuff/house

Today we used up some more inherited paint, a 2.5 l tin of Crown "Breatheasy" low VOC matt emulsion paint. It will cover 35 m² of previously painted wall, according to Crown.

First off, it stank to high-heaven, I dread to think what their normal odour paint smells off. My second surprise was that the whole 2.4 l has been consumed painting an area as of less than 20 m² in our larder. The surface was previously painted masonry, so it may be more thirsty than a normal wall, but even so we got only about 50% expected coverage - less than expected.

In an hour or so it will be time to put another coat of paint onto the walls, with luck the second coat will cover a bit better now that the wall have been sealed with a fresh coat of paint.

posted 18:08 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

We just put a coat of ECOS Sierra matt wall paint onto the kitchen wall. It went on well and has dried up lovely. The kitchen now has a warm Mediterranean feel.

The gloss paint on the doors was much harder to live with. It doesn't look so nice and I found it really hard to put it on. I'll sand it down a bit and try another coat. The gloss on the window frames and skirting boards isn't as bad, again it will look better with a top coat.

ECOS isn't cheap but it's worth it for volatile organic solvent free paint system. All the walls and most of the woodwork have been painted the kitchen doesn't smell of paint and it all dried with in an hour - pretty good going!

posted 21:00 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

When I finished my first degree I spent a summer working for John Ashworth & Partners. It was a very interesting job and at the same time I learnt a lot about the paint industry and how poor most paint actually is.

One of the things they invented and I got to play with is ECOS^*, their zero odour paint system. It is a 100% volatile organic free paint system. Basically it is a water based system that actually works.

The problem with ECOS is the same as the problem with Linux and a whole host of other things, it doesn't matter that you are vastly superior to the brand leader, the fact you are not brand leader make it almost impossible to sell the stuff.

Now I own my own home, I have to put my money where my mouth is and actually buy their paint to use on my own house. For the past few weeks I've been running down paint the house came with, soon I'll have to buy fresh and it's going to be UK invented, UK made, top quality stuff!

* Warning, the ECOS web site is a bit hippy and full of tree hugging nonsense, but the paint that is in the tins is brilliant stuff.

posted 20:52 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

This spring we moved into a new house. We are using the same energy company as the previous owners so we can compare our energy use this year against their usage last year.

There were three of them in the house compared with just two of us, but when we viewed the house we didn't see plasma TVs in every room, it seem very normal.

Though it's not a strict comparison, though I have been taking fortnightly meter readings they are not all used and power company does tend to average out previous years. On the power companies own figures it's an estimated 4.6 tonnes CO₂ reduction on last year if we continue at our current energy use rate for the year.

Given that I leave a server running 24x7 at home, what on earth were they doing that used so much gas and electricity? If you are thinking hot water - it's not that, our is solar powered!

posted 08:51 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

Not only are we in our very own house but we are actually on-line too. BT managed to get the act together and connect our Nildram (Opal) ADSL line all up and running a day or so earlier than forcast.

Our new office is a nice enough room, but when we have seriously worked on the house and got it properly sorted, the office will be much nicer and larger than the temporary arrangment we have now.

posted 22:18 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

We are in our new house. We're still off-line while BT drag their feet getting the ADSL line sorted, but we are physically living in our very own house.

Lots of things need doing, the house is in worse state than we thought, however all the changes we planned are still going to take place, and in the same order, just some things made be done sooner than planned.

In a very short while I will feel very poor as the bill start to pour in!

posted 14:09 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

Today we collected our keys and we now own legally and physically our own house. It needs things doing on it but it's liveable, which is a good compromise.

I'm signing off for a while as we go off "net", for the move, back here soon...

posted 15:41 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

Next week the contracts are completed and we will own our own house. This time we have not been forced out by a greedy landlord - I almost feel sorry for our current one who has been better than the previous ones.

We have no specific reason to own our house, it's a waste of money and in the long term bad for the economy locking billions of pounds up in unproductive bricks and mortar rather than doing something useful like investing for the future. On the up side for once it means we get to pick what is in the house and what colour walls are.

In the medium term we have various plans for the house, proper modern insulation in the loft and under the ground flour, modern high efficiency appliances, re-wired mains with enough sockets in the right places and CAT-6a structured cable in all rooms. One idea is for a rear south facing solar room to be built to make the most out of the free solar heat.

posted 12:25 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

Our legal team are doing the contract exchange as I type. They tried to do the exchange yesterday but failed because the other legal people had gone home for the day - some lawyers evidently don't work as hard as other ones...

posted 10:54 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

For the first time in a long time we have served notice to our landlord rather than the other way around. It's a pity, our current house is the best of the houses we have had in the UK. It has no garden, but it's the best internal space and noticeably better built that the others.

Yesterday we started the process of exchanging contracts on our own house. The new house is not perfect, it's a semi not detached and the garden is tiny, but on the upside it's a decent size internally (over 120 m²), in the right location, and fair price (by local standards).

The house is cosmetically dull and inoffensive but clean and livable. Our plans are to live in the house a year or so then start our own grand designs on refurbishing it. I want to drag it out of dark ages with regards thermal efficiency, put structured CAT-6a through out the building and add back some nice Art Deco touches to the building.

I can't say the process has been pain free. We have been looking to buy for past 8 years. Most of the time it's been an absurd process, house prices in "la la" land and utterly unaffordable. However on the upside we have made great strides on saving money - being a tight northerner helps - so when we found we almost liked we were is a strong position to buy.

posted 09:14 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

Over the weekend we moved house again. Our last landlord like the preceding one chose to try and sell the house from under us. The preceding landlord failed to sell and was forced to put the house back on the rental market - having missed the peak of the boom by about six months.

The new house is marginally larger than the two previous ones and significantly better built than the previous one. We hope that the current house will be only a temporary move our plans to but our own house are progressing and with luck we'll only be here for month or two.

We are gradually getting good at the house moving game. So far as we unpack, nothing seems to have been broken and everything appears to be in order. When we eventually move for the last time, I hope things will go as well.

posted 15:47 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

The house hunting goes well. After 8 years of searching we have finally found a house that we would like to buy. We have put in an offer that has been accepted and now we are in the infuriating state between acceptance and completion which could last weeks to months, or fall through, as one in three often do.

We have even found a house to rent to bridge the gap between our current property and our possible new one. Other than the inconvenience of a forced move we could do without, things are actually going rather well.

posted 18:31 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

The UK has the smallest average sized homes of the "developed" countries, about one third the size of a typical Australian house. The UK also has some of the most poorly built modern houses and a large body of inefficient and in need of replacement old houses.

For most of the last half decade house building has been a mixture of shoddy standard and poor design and worst of all far too few houses have been built, constantly missing targets for decades at a time. The Overall result is that houses are absurdly expensive and stupidly small. They are probably the wost value for money anywhere in the "developed" world.

An "average house" is now well above the acceptable level at which a mortgage is normally lent to someone on "average income". In 2003 the national average ratio was around 3.4 by the height of the boom it had reached 5.1. This is utterly insustainable in the long run and has been a contributing factor in the recent price correction.

Because a sensible house it so stupidly expensive in the UK, an absurd concept of a "buying ladder" has developed. You buy a house you can afford but don't want, pay some mortgage off on it, then after a few years you sell it and buy a bigger one and so on until you arrive at the house you do want. Given that house prices tended to rise faster than inflation in the 70s and 80s this would mean each trade up you could use the gain in property prices of the lower rung to fund the deposit on the higher rung. The fact that the rungs tend to get farther apart as house prices rise, was silently ignored by the bulk of the population.

When we moved to the village the "normal UK" thing to do would have been to buy a house and by now we'd be on our second or third house. Instead we chose to rent and even though we are being forced into our third house I still think we are ahead financially. If we had bought the first house we lived in for the price it was probably worth then of about £180k it would now be worth around £200-210k, a capital gain of £20-30k. We would have paid a monthly mortgage of at least £1k, or at least £250 per month more than our rent, which over the years means we have saved more than the house would have appreciated. Over the years we would have paid some of the mortgage off but we'd have also had much higher maintenance and service charges for owning the house and that excludes all the legal costs.

As it happens we have actually save considerably more than above figure, so other the inconvenience of having to probably move twice this year we should be able to buy the house we (nearly) really want this year with less of a problem than if we had done the "normal" thing.

PS. Trying to explain a house buying ladder to foreign relatives is very hard - it seems so illogically!

posted 16:23 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

What I have been expecting for some time has happened. The national media has been hyping houses to death and no doubt our "unwilling-landlord" has decided that now is the best time to evict us and sell their house.

It's their house and I have no problem with them trying to sell it, to be honest we don't like it, it's small, cold and poorly built, however moving is a royal pain in the arse and a "notice to quit" is such a lovely Christmas present. Given that winter is the absolute low point in the UK property market and we lose a fortnight to Christmas and New Year it's going to be really dreadful to find another hovel to rent in time...

This has happened before, and as last time our only consolation is that with property prices again falling and things expected to get noticeably worse next year, my landlord is probably going to be worse off than me by the end of next year.

posted 09:07 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

House prices are up again. Somehow people think rising house prices are good, yet when petrol or food goes up they are up in arms claiming that it's the end of the world...

There are three possibilities:

1. We are at the bottom of the recession and things are looking up.
2. We are not yet at the bottom and it's all hype from the vested interests in government and the media who desperately need things to be on the up to dig themselves out of their debt prisons.
3. It's just the predicted "dead cat" bounce and prices will continue to fall once reality bites.

With house sale volumes so low, mortgage expensive and rare and unemployment relentlessly rising I think we are just in the middle of a predictable fool's rally. Next year the new government (of whatever shade of blue) is going to be forced to cut expenditure, raise taxes and allow the Bank of England to raise interest rates (as they are currently way too low). That will force house prices down again and the house price correction will continue.

posted 09:52 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^