House work…

Once you have a house, that is it: you’ll have a “To-Do” list as long as your arm for life! (Well, as long as you have a house, anyway).

We are currently in the process of having our bathroom fixed up (i.e. the dividing wall between the toilet and bathroom knocked through, new towel rail, a shaver point put in, new shower head rail, etc). It’s a job we’ve been wanting to do for ages, and now we’ve finally got round to it. You’d think that would decrease the list of things we have to do, wouldn’t you? Think again. The electrician (who came to wire up the shaver point and the lighting) said that our lighting circuit is 60s standards (which isn’t surprising given that the house was built in the 60s). Modern standards are different – in order for it to be different we’d need to have the whole lighting circuit rewired. This is actually a fairly big job, costing around £1000. Not only that, but we’d also need to have a new fuse box put in at the same time…

Of course, it’s not urgent that we have the house lighting re-wired. But if we want to have any electrical work done on the house in the future I think we’ll need to have the wiring brought up to modern standards, otherwise electricians will refuse to touch it.

So, I thought I’d give a brief list of things which we have already done on the house, and things which we still need to do. It will be interesting to come back to it in a year or two and see what’s changed!

TASKS COMPLETED

• Re-decorate main bedroom
• Re-decorate spare bedroom
• Re-decorate small bedroom (partially completed)
• Replace facia board
• Paint cupboard under stairs, fit shelves
• Create flower borders, plant up garden (partially completed)
• Paint shed

TASKS STILL TO DO

• Replace boiler (current boiler went out of production in 1983, it’s almost certainly older than I am)
• Re-decorate living room / dining room
• Replace cooker hood & install cupboards in kitchen
• Re-wire house
• Move front door to be flush with front of house (i.e. the porch area would be come part of the house)

And that’s just a sample really – once we’ve got through that lot there will be carpets to replace, rooms to re-decorate (again), and a myriad of small jobs. Ah well, keeps us busy I suppose, not that we really need any help on that front!