All your Homebase are belong to... you! / The House 'n' Home Thread. - The Bear and Badger

cockbeard

poprock wrote:

Got my sofa delivered today. Custom built for me. Fuck yeah. This is the sort of thing I spend money on instead of booze or holidays.

Verrrr nice

spent many a night on similar but cheaper made, I should leave pubs before morning realy

edit:shite page turn, fixedish

g.man

That's very swish.

hylian_elf

Wow. Nice!!! How much, if you don’t mind me asking?

poprock

Och, no shyness about about money here. The sofa was a shade under £2k. I know that sounds a lot, but it’s cheap for anything similar and a ridiculous bargain for something handmade to spec.

My reckoning for the price of household stuff is very different now to what it was a few years ago. The last sofa I bought was three hundred quid. But it was objectively shit. And now that I have more money to spend, I want to spend it on the things that matter. Shoes, bed, sofa. Then food.

(Also, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to our overall spend on the renovation. This is my wee treat.)

hylian_elf

£2k sounds cheap! We spent £5k on a 3 piece once. Many decades ago. I still hold it against my wife for getting rid of them even if they were getting on a bit.

poprock

It’s from a shoe company. I bought shoes from them for my wedding and the leather was SO nice. Found out they offer sofas ever since making one for a photoshoot a few years ago. Spoke to the owner, negotiated a price, and five weeks later that arrived. Surprisingly easy.

Diluted Dante

My reckoning is very different because I spend however much it cost to hire the van to get it from the previous persons house.

davyK

£2K is good value for something that looks as great as that. Assuming it will last and keep its looks over several years.

poprock

Aye. No shade against living cheaper though. Took a long time for me to get to a point where I can do this stuff.

LivDiv

That sofa is gorgeous mate. 2k is an absolute bargain. Contacts are so important mind.
My mate was the furniture designer for Debenhams and is lead designer at a smaller firm now, the prices he has quoted me are half retail and with all the options in the world.

When I get my house I will be looking at something very similar to yours.

Now mowers.
I have never mowed a lawn in my life as I have never had a garden and it is a bit of a passion for my dad so it wasnt an assigned chore.
He used to have a side hussle buying petrol movers from the dump, servicing them and flogging them at work. Nine times out of ten they were just clogged with grass. He had a similar run with Dysons, changing filters.
Take them apart and clean them and they will last many, many times longer.

Unlikely

A space shuttle is about to land on it.

EDIT: Pop's sofa.

Roujin

Nice sofa Poppo! A chesterfield is on my long term list if things I'd like to buy if I get the money, best sofas.

Roujin

Ayo shout outs to E.on who after cosing my account sent a catchup bill for my old flat for nearly £2500 and took the money straight out of my bank account.

FYI people, you should know that operators are only allowed to send a catch up bill for the last 12 months after they discover an error. Anything beyond that is their loss unless they can demonstrate you have been obstructive in not allowing then to obtain a meter reading.

So yeah, fuck E.on for trying to say that in a 1 bed flat which I already paid £65/month for the electric (it was electric only) over the last 4 years i should have actually been paying £100 a month. Are you fucking srs my guys? That's fucking weed farm territory mate. They also dont have the reading i would have had to give them when i moved in, only an estimated reading.

Now i have to wait 14 working days to find out what their "resolution" team are going to do to resolve the issue, as they already admitted fucking up trying to claim beyond the 12 months.

Shout outs to my bank though for texting me to tell me a massive amount of money just left the account, and for answering the phone in minutes to hit that bill with the indemnity claim and reverse that payment with the quickness.

Now im going to go home and double check all the meter readings at my new place out of paranoia.

The Daddy

Bastards.

poprock

Absolute shitbags. Or base level incompetents. YOU DECIDE.

Props to your bank for acting well though Rouj.

hylian_elf

Energy companies are cunts. EDF once robbed us of £120. Not much, but had to take it to Ofgem to get it back cos they’re so fucking cunts.

GooberTheHat

That's shit. Well done to the bank though. How did they still have access to your account though? I would have thought that the DD would no longer be valid after that length of time.

GooberTheHat

You know what you should do though Roujin, you should switch to a environmentally responsible energy provider, such as bulb.

I even have a handy link you can use if you like.

www.bulb.me/erin9104

Plus you'll get £75 credit.

:-D

Roujin

I'm on different provider at the new place, so not having to deal with e.on anyway (who to be fair, aside from routinely overcharging me every year on my direct debit and having to give me money back every 12 months, have been fine other than this weapons grade fuckery), will switch if possible but I think it might be handled through the housing association due took the shared ownership thing, will check.

The DD was probably still valid as my last bill prior to this when moving out was at the end of may.

poprock

Our downstairs neighbour has started being suspiciously, terrifyingly, nice. In writing, by leaving letters at the door.

I reckon she’s been told to by her lawyer after receiving notification that our insurance company will shortly be sending her the bill for all of our building repairs.

She’s having a floating acoustic ceiling installed and wrote to us to ‘put our minds at rest that it is no reflection on our perfectly normal noise levels’ above her. No, you silly woman, it’s a reflection on the fact that you moved your bedroom directly underneath our living room and then removed all of the ash deafening that soundproofed the floor/ceiling for the past two hundred years. Isn’t it?

poprock

I hate the Scottish house buying system. (For those not in the know, it’s basically blind auctions – properties are advertised at ‘offers over £xxxx’ and you have to just take a punt.)

We viewed a house on Monday night. Chatted about it last night. Decided that we’ll put an offer in next week – allowing a few days to get our flat valued and agree a realistic mortgage budget.

It was only put on the market on Friday, so it’s not as if we’re hanging about here.

The estate agent phoned this afternoon to tell us that because two other people have put in offers already, they’re now closing the sale on Wednesday. Too soon for us to get a figure in place.

Now, this is the same agent who is booked in to value our flat on Tuesday. So they know we want to bid, they are the ones holding us up from being able to bid right now, and they are the ones who have chosen to close the bidding early. So they’re deliberately shutting us out in order to get a fast sale, despite knowing that waiting a couple more days for us to bid as well would be better for the seller – more chance of a higher bid.

*shrug*

Fuck ’em. I didn’t like the house as much as my wife did anyway.

LivDiv

Trust me, it is infinitely better than down here.
Down here they can accept an offer, go through months of shit and solicitor fees then pull out days before you plan on moving in.

When my mate bought his flat they rang him a couple of months after the offer was accepted and tried to put £5k on top of the price because house prices had gone up in that time period.
Luckily he was in a position to tell them to fuck off and kept it the same price but if he had kids and what not it might have been different.

acemuzzy

Aye gazumping and gazundering can gtfo

Unlikely

Yeah, I'd much rather the blind auction system we have here than the English system which sounds massively stressful. Er, you should probably have had your flat valued before you started looking, so you could have reacted as quickly as is often needed here, but I guess you know that.

Lord_Griff

But it may have gone up £5k

poprock

We completed four months of building work last week. In fact, the snagging is still ongoing (we had a tiler, a joiner and a decorator in today fixing some small issues).

Getting it valued was on the agenda for next month, but trust my wife to spot a house she really likes too soon.

LivDiv

It happens.
I'm probably not going to put my place on the market until Feb/March but I still look.

I've found a house that on paper(rightmove) is spot on. It has been reduced by 10k as well since I first saw it.
I could sell my 2 bed flat, buy this 2 bed house, with garden and driveway, buy and have installed one of those nice prefab garden office buildings, pay the vultures and pretty much break even.
Just need to secure work in't North.

poprock

There’s plenty of work in t’Northern Power’ouse. Or so the Tories say.

mk64

Mower basics - you pay mainly for the capacity. Go cheap and you'll do about 6 ft of lawn before needing to empty it. You'll spend the majority of the day emptying it. Larger/more expensive ones are the way forward really.

We've got a loft which has some insulation type stuff down but no floor/mdf. Anyone know much about putting MDF down so we can put boxes in there? Do I have to stuff the insulation down in a certain way or anything odd like that?

The Daddy

I boarded our loft back in October. I used loft stilts from B&Q to create an elevated platform and put boards down on top. It wasn’t difficult, but screwing some of the stilts in was a bit fiddly due to precarious balancing.

These are what I used:

https://www.diy.com/departments/diall-loft-storage-stilt-pack-of-12/181925_BQ.prd

I also recommend these, although they’re relatively expensive for what they are. Good for keeping things tidy though:

https://www.wickes.co.uk/Loftleg-Loft-Ledge-Kit-for-Trussed-Roofs---550-x-530mm/p/114291

Here’s a pic of what one section looked like part way through:

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