Dom Davis (The Blog)

Aft deciding that We Are Going To Rent we promptly had second thoughts. Renting is a pain. It means we could have to move twice in quick succession, which sucks at the best of times, but with a small one in tow is going to be even worse and I just hate the fact that I can do things to the house. That said it’s a temporary measure and I will live pretty much anywhere as long as I have a few basic things¹.

Buying is also awkward. We’re in a God awful limbo whereby tens of thousands of pounds are tied up in other property and yet more money will be coming… at some point². If I could release all of that and go buy somewhere tomorrow we’d be laughing. But we can’t and actual money available for a deposit is small and may need to be used to make Little Cottage fit to rent.

So, our options are:

• Do nothing. Stay in a 1 bedroom house with a little one who lives in the living room.
• Rent and wait for a deposit to either arrive or be saved before buying.
• Buy something cheap temporarily, possibly pushing the budget so we could be asking parents for money if we don’t have rental income one month.
• Sell Little Cottage, almost certainly at a slight loss, but somewhere new with the money that unlocks.
• Sell everything (for a big loss), go buy something (ironically smaller than if we just sold Little Cottage due to lost money) and no longer have multiple mortgages to deal with.
• Sell everything, do a runner, enjoy a year abroad before returning home destitute.

I don’t think selling my flat is really an option so well take that off the table. We’ll know more about the rental and sale potential of Little Cottage on Thursday and in the mean time we’ll just have to continue scouring the rental and property markets. The only thing I assure of from the entire process is that what the meticulous spreadsheet I’ve put together says I should have left in my account each month and what I do have left in the account don’t match. I need to curb my spending :S

¹ Internet, somewhere to set up and play on the play station, that kind of thing
² With some point supposedly last August but actually being any time between tomorrow and… well, whenever really. Could be years.

The Zozo has a quantity (I want to say six, but it could be 7) of arachnids, specifically tarantulas that she keeps at home. I remain mostly ambivalent about these house guests as, despite being anathema, they are in individual holding cells, which are placed into a locked spider containment unit in the living room. Besides, unlike your common or garden spider, they are quite cool to look at ,through the safety of the glass and 3mm Perspex barriers of course.

These spiders need feeding on a fairly regular basis and are fed a diet of live, or very recently live insects, mostly cockroaches and crickets. For a long time The Zozo was breeding a colony of cockroaches in the bathroom (safely ensconced in a double walled container before you panic) but it seems the wee beasties have munched their way through these as they no longer appear to be there. The current dish de jour would seem to be crickets. These live in a small box within the spider containment unit to keep them happy until such point as they become food.

We’ve recently had to move things about in the house. Willow will very soon outgrow her Moses basket so the living room has been reorganised to house the cot (Willow resolutely refusing to sleep upstairs). To accommodate this the spider containment unit has been moved upstairs onto the landing, which has presented a hitherto unexpected problem: chirping.

Crickets, as you may or may not know, make a chirping noise using their hind legs and you can quite often hear one of the crickets in the house doing this, especially during the night as my head is about 2m from them. What is surprising is its not the noise that I find disturbing, it’s that there is not enough of it. Having lived in many foreign countries and having, as I do, colonial roots, I am quite used the night sounds of the tropics and rather enjoy hearing the night time chorus of crickets, frogs and cicadas. It tells me that outside there is a tropical paradise, warm weather and good food. Hearing a single cricket somehow has the opposit effect. It causes to remind me that I am not in tropical climes, it’s cold outside and I’m going to have to leave the house in the dark and go to work in a few hours.

That said, the chirping does have one useful purpose: it tells me the internal holding cells of the spider containment unit have not failed and we do not need to look towards implementing the Hammer Down protocol should the second level containment fail. Its not quite the motion sensors and laser tripwires that I wanted, but The Zozo won’t let me have those because she thinks I’m being silly.

This morning we made the executive decision that we were going to have to rent. Little Cottage is really too small for 3 people and Willow has got to an age where we need to put her to bed and leave her to it. This means having to retire to the bedroom as she lives in the living room. We need a room to put her in where I don’t have to worry that cooking my dinner will disturb her and where we still have space to relax and unwind at the end of the day.

Sadly, despite owning two properties, I’m not really in a position to sell. My flat is still in negative equity (although less than it was) and I’d really like to see it go up in price another £40K before I sell it, something that could take a few years. Little Cottage has held its value, but moving is expensive and I’d like to recoup that.

A plan that solved everything did materialise out of the death of my grandmother since the money left to me easily covered the cost of buying a third property and would allow us to simply rent out Little Cottage and, in a few years time when the housing market was out of the toilet, consolidate the 3 houses into a forever home. Sadly illness in the family has meant sorting of the will is taking rather longer than expected and we can no longer wait.

The interim solution is, of course, to rent a place ourselves. The initial outlay is less meaning our savings are intact should we not have tenants in our properties, or if they need work, and it’s cheaper than the repayment in the mortgage we’d need to get on a similar property so we can continue to save for a future purchase.

I rather suspect we will end up in a soulless 1980s box, but it will be a soulless 1980s box with a room for guests (and my desk and a computer), a room for Willow, a parking space and a garden that delivery drivers can find without detailed directions and me standing outside. I’ve no doubt The Zozo will start looking today, but we plan to start looking in earnest this weekend. Scarily this means we could be moving in a matter of weeks! Thankfully, since we’re not selling we can take our time moving out, and then, when it’s empty, get Little Cottage tarted up ready to rent out. This takes a lot of the stress out of proceedings.

Since the birth of Willow I’ve have an awful lot of time off, thanks, in part, to me saving a lot of holiday to the end of the year and also due to it being Christmas and the large chunks of time off handed out around this time. I’ve spent most of the time playing Skyrim (which is partly responsible for the lack of blogs) so it was little surprise that, at about 7pm on new years day I was sat there, controller in hand while The Zozo watched TV on her laptop and Willow slept on her. A pretty standard scene of late, except on this particular date the house suddenly went pop and was plunged into darkness and silence.

Like a few places I’ve lived in Little Cottage can often trip the entire lighting circuit if a bulb blows. But that’s when you turn the lights on and the bulb blows. No one had been turning on any lights, and besides, with the exception of The Zozos laptop, the entire house was off. One of two things had happened: power cut, or something had blown the fuse box. With the latter being the easiest to check I grabbed my phone, turned on the torch [power cut? There's and app for that] and checked the consumer unit. The fuses were all fine, but the RCD had tripped. For the initiated out there the fuses will blow if too much power is being drawn in order to protect that circuit. Usually only one circuit will trip (which is why it’s just the lights that go out when a bulb blows), but there is a master fuse which can go and take out the entire house. The RCD checks for short circuits and will turn off the entire house if one is found. Putting the RCD into the on position simply had it flip back to the off position. Not good. Something in the house was shorting.

Two culprits spring to mind. We’ve been running an electric heater in the living room practically 24×7 and the last, admittedly much cheaper, one we did that to blew up when The Zozo tried turning it on once. That was straight off at the mains, along with the TV cabinet as that had a lot of kit plugged into an eight way that was unceremoniously rammed down the side which could have a loose wire. Next up was the kitchen. Our kitchen tap has developed a slight leak and while there is a little pot to catch the drips I wondered if something had leaked and shorted out the washing machine.

On entering the kitchen I found the floor had water on it. But this water was soapy, which wouldn’t have come from the tap on the sink. The washing machine wasn’t actually going, so that wasn’t the issue. No, the only soapy water of late was… Willows bath.

Willow has a foldaway bath that we use with a plug that has an annoying habit of popping out. For this reason it’s used in the bathroom, with the theory being that if it leaks it’s not a huge issue. The theory didn’t quite take into account the age of Little Cottage. Soapy water was coming out of the bath,along the floor, down through the wall and out throught the light switch it the kitchen, down the outside of the wall and onto the floor. We had our culprit.

First things first, damage limitation. Willows bath was dumped in the shower and a towel put down between the rest of the water and the, until now, unnoticed 5mm gap between the tiles and the floor on one wall. Next up totally isolate the house electrics by turning off every fuse before unscrewing the switch faceplate in the kitchen and laughing at the juxtaposition of bubbles covering all the wires. Happy that it was just the lighting circuit and not trunking for anything else I then turned all the fuses apart from the lighting circuit back on and flipped the RCD. The house came back on.

The PS3 really doesn’t like being shutdown improperly so I then tested that was happy and not going to whinge about verifying its disk and spend hours doing that (priorities, people!) before digging out the torches because, let’s face it, an iPhone, the Christmas tree lights and a gummy bear LED light weren’t quite going to cut the mustard when it came to adequately lighting the place. We then sat down to not watch Pat die on TV because we had now apparently missed the start of that.

Before heading to bed I replaced the light faceplate as it looked drier and less bubbly. I didn’t turn the circuit back on though, figuring I’d give it another few hours to dry overnight just in case. The next morning I flipped the switch and all was well. Mad for a fun evening. To avoid a repeat of the fun The Zozo is expermimenting with putting the bath in the shower. I suspect judicious use of sealant may also be in order to blog the gap between the floor and the wall.

This year was the first year in a long time (certainly since we’ve been together) that The Zozo wasn’t working on Christmas day. Past years have seen us up at 6:15, at the zoo for 8am where I go and see my parents and The Zozo does her rounds feeding the animals, followed by drinks in Keepers Cottage and then heading to The Zozos parents for food.

This year The Zozo is on maternity leave so we didn’t get up until gone 7 (even Willow had a lie in), had a lazy breakfast with bucks fizz and then proceeded to open our gifts, which this year consisted primarily of chocolate We still ate at The Zozos parents, but then it would be foolish to pass up a home made full roast with all the trimmings and three different desserts.

Willow wasn’t too sure what to make of Christmas, but seems to like her new toys. I suspect it will be a couple of years before the true magic of Christmas kicks in. We did also try venturing further afield with her to eat over the bank holiday and during this week Willow will be coming all the way to Norwich to have lunch with me and her uncle.

I, on the other hand, knew exactly what to make of Christmas and filled my days eating far too much chocolate and sugar and playing loads of Skyrim. It’s back to work today, but this week is rarely taxing and will also involve lots of chocolate, if not so much Skyrim.

The whole biweekly bin collection thing has never really affected us much before. There have been a couple of occasions where I’ve either forgotten to put the bin out, or we’ve been away, and it’s ended up a month between bin collections and things have got a big tight. Christmas is also often fun with its increased rubbish, although to be fair we burn most of that.

We now have a baby and our rubbish output has stepped up a gear. I’d say that 50% of our bin is nappies and I’m having to ram the last few bags in in order to get the lid to perform a close approximation of shut. God help us if we miss a collection, or a bank holiday puts even more time between each collections (Christmas could be fun).

Just about the only saving grace is that we have a full sized bin. Most of our neighbours seem to have a slimline job which would be woefully inadequate for us.

I have a lot of books that have been purchased over the years to aid me in my job. Sadly these weighty tomes tend to go out of date rather quickly which means I had a bookshelf full of very expensive, very obsolete books that I was a bit loath to get rid of. As part of the great eBay-off that The Zozo had before Willow arrived we (or rather she) tried to sell some of these books. Rather unsurprisingly she had limited success. Since the space these books occupied n the bookshelf has been claimed by other things, and since I’m not going to just put them in the loft to languish for eternity we’re putting them to the only use left: heating.

That’s right: I’m burning books!

Now, before anyone gets on their high horse just remember we tried to sell them and they really are of no use to man nor beast – unless you happen to be stuck writing code a decade ago. They also require special arrangement in the fire otherwise they don’t burn so well. I’ve found the best way to squeeze every BTU out of them is to place some eco logs underneath them, put the book in open half way and face down, and then more eco logs on the top. Because of this I call bullshit on the scene in “The Day After Tomorrow” where they’re burning books in the fireplace for warmth (yes, I’m aware the entire film is free and easy with the science and the facts, but we have verifiable proof here) as they don’t burn that well without an external fuel source.

Having adequate, if somewhat selective hearing I’ve never really bothered about subtitles before. As far as I was concerned subtitles were the things you had at the bottom of foreign films so you could understand what was going on.

The arrival of Willow has changed all this. Little Cottage is just that: little. We have one bedroom and all three of us [notionally] sleep in there (this is, of course, assuming The Zozo hasn’t taken a fidgety or upset Willow downstairs as has happened on more than one occasion). In order that The Zozo doesn’t get too bored while performing one of the many night feeds she likes to watch the TV. The problem there being that she doesn’t want to disturb me or Willow. The solution: subtitles.

The upstairs TV now pretty much permanently has subtitles turned on, even when we’ve got the sound up, and I find myself reading the regardless of if I need to or not. Live shows are the funniest as everything appears on screen a few seconds after its actually said with the odd amusing mistake, omission or correction. I know a lot of it is done by voice recognition, but there are times when I suspect some poor sod is just typing away furiously on their chorded keyboard in order to keep up with the stream of dialogue from whatever happens to be on at the time.

Having adequate, if somewhat selective hearing I’ve never really bothered about subtitles before. As far as I was concerned subtitles were the things you had at the bottom of foreign films so you could understand what was going on.

The arrival of Willow has changed all this. Little Cottage is just that: little. We have one bedroom and all three of us [notionally] sleep in there (this is, of course, assuming The Zozo hasn’t taken a fidgety or upset Willow downstairs as has happened on more than one occasion). In order that The Zozo doesn’t get too bored while performing one of the many night feeds she likes to watch the TV. The problem there being that she doesn’t want to disturb me or Willow. The solution: subtitles.

The upstairs TV now pretty much permanently has subtitles turned on, even when we’ve got the sound up, and I find myself reading the regardless of if I need to or not. Live shows are the funniest as everything appears on screen a few seconds after its actually said with the odd amusing mistake, omission or correction. I know a lot of it is done by voice recognition, but there are times when I suspect some poor sod is just typing away furiously on their chorded keyboard in order to keep up with the stream of dialogue from whatever happens to be on at the time.

Thud. Poor little pinky had fallen. She wasn’t well. The Zozo found her that morning huddled in the corner of her car, face on the floor. She wasn’t eating and was very wobbly on her feet. Since then I’d had Pinky out and fed her some chocolate cake. This had perked up a little bit but was still wobbly. Now, unable to stand properly or walk straight, she’d obviously slipped off the ledge in her cage. Watching her make her way back up again was distressing. She was wobbling so much she could barely walk up her ramp, needing several attempts to make it. Clambering up the various bits of her cage was a struggle, the risk of falling again ever present.

Sadly we knew this was it. Pinky was 2, which is very old for a mouse. She’d outlived the other mice by a long way and she’d survived long enough to meet Willow. That night I gave her a final stroke and said my goodbyes.

At some point during the night Pinky passed away. I think she had a happy life. She certainly bought us more joy. I spent the morning packing away her home and cleaning down where the mice had been. At some point over the next few weeks we’ll put her, and the other mice, into the Cristal box and cremate them. What with Willow to look after I think it’ll be a while before we get any new pets.