Another year older but no further in debt

Happy new year folks

It almost makes me smile to think about those who will be struggling with their new years resolution to either give up smoking or cut down on drinking. I'm almost a full year ahead on both.

Have I smoked? Yes, there have been slip ups but I'm almost through the first year. My weakness has been the occasional, irrational cigar. Even one makes me dizzy enough to fall over but, every so often I have caved. The good news is that I have also been able to return to the world of non smoking without pain or cravings. As for the drink....

Lack of hard cash has meant that drinking has been reduced to one or two bottles of wine over a weekend. It's been a forced abstinence rather than voluntary and I did love the brief respite of Christmas when I drunk almost like the old days but, by and large, drink has been an area of my life where I've been able to save a fair bit and felt a lot better for it. If money ever returns to normal I think I'll still go without during the week.

Without smoking or drinking to torment me you may be worried that the blog will go all iPhone on you. Not so. I've fallen completely out of love with that device. It basically looked great and had a myriad of functions that should have made it the greatest phone on earth. The problem was that it didn't perform any single function well and sometimes didn't perform at all. I reset it to its factory settings back in November. It works as a phone and does some things well but is nowhere near the phone that it claims to be and from my point of view never will be.

Nope, this years blog will be about saving or earning money. I intend to share my fight to maintain a quality of life despite this painful recession. I'm considering renaming the blog to 'Make dough and mend'. What do you think?

I've already managed to earn £80 by changing my electricity supplier whilst the new supplier gave me a bonus of £100 for switching and promises savings of around £200 over the course of the next year. It has to be said that I haven't seen this money yet but I live in hope. As well as this I have saved on car tyres managing to replace two tyres for less than the cost of having one fitted by the dealer.

This month has been no different and I have a couple of ideas to share to help the savings mount. Back about September/October our dishwasher kicked the bucket. God she was sorely missed. My wife is a great cook and I'm lucky to eat fantastic food but..She likes to use every dish and pot in the kitchen to do so. For months I have been fighting a mountain of dishes that just doesn't seem to ever go down. She's accused me of having OCD because I go into a deep depression when I can't keep on top of the never ending pile of washing. Anyway Yahoo have site that is simply fantastic for such an emergency. Freecycle. Google it and you will be amazed. Based on your postcode or zip code you will find a freecycle community in your neighbourhood. The idea is simple. Got stuff you don't want? Give it away to someone that does. The person taking said goods doesn't pay anything but has to arrange collection and removal at their own expense. In the past we have given away items as diverse as gym equipment and feather cushions. I know of one woman who wanted the stone chips removed from her drive so she could re-surface it. She offered the chips to anyone who could remove them on a set date. The drive was cleared free of charge.

Anyway, once you have donated stuff to freecycle you can then ask for stuff. So we asked for a dishwasher. A guy about three miles away had just had a new kitchen fitted and wanted the old appliances taken away. We took the dishwasher. If it hadn't worked we could just have binned it but, no, it was a working dishwasher. I am delighted. The dishwasher is installed and working and it cost precisely nothing. It doesn't get better than that.

So how do I calculate the saving on this one? Well a new dishwasher would be £200+ but it's not a new dishwasher so it wouldn't be realistic to count that as a saving. A second hand dishwasher I imagine would be about £50 so that's what I'm adding this in as.

Total Saving on Dishwasher £50
Time delay: N/A

The next saving exposed a flaw in a previous saving that I thought I was making. My bank account comes with free breakdown cover amongst other things. It's not unusual now for banks to offer these types of benefit as there seems precious little else to recommend them. I've always seen breakdown cover as being essential as my first car was a banger and needed recovered more than once and my wife has a classic old car that really shouldn't still be roadworthy but is. So, despite hating the bank, one of the reasons I stuck with them was that I perceived this breakdown cover to be worth about £60 per year. I drive a newish car however and don't expect to break down.

Expect the unexpected. Between Christmas and new year we suddenly lost power and found ourselves stranded in quite a dangerous position at the side of a very busy country road. We phoned our breakdown cover. It turns out that all we had cover for was if we could get fixed at the roadside. Had the car needed towed it would have been taken to the nearest garage and we would have had to look out for ourselves over 100 miles from home. Fortunately it was started at the roadside and we got home without incident. My first thought however was to arrange a recovery service. Should this ever happen again I want the security of knowing that I will get towed home if needs be or to my forward destination.

I did a load of price comparisons and found someone at less than half the price of the big guys. I checked all their literature and read some reviews on them as there is no point them being cheep if they can't do the job. It's all good. They basically have links with loads of local recovery firms so will organise recovery with someone local to your breakdown. They will recover me home as well. If you are in the UK try Rescuemycar.com

Despite this I wanted a little more. You see no-one has been able to figure out why I broke down in the first place. The in car computer shows no faults, the battery is working and the engine has run like a dream before and since. This is good but is also a form of torture because I can't guarantee that the problem won't reoccur. For this reason I also wanted home start. This means that they will also come to your home and try to get you going, or tow you to garage if there is a problem. There are two main motoring organisations in the UK and both want over £100 to offer, repair, recovery and home start. I now have the lot plus piece of mind for £32. What's more I purchased this option via quidco so will get about £6 cash back. All in the a cost of £26 against £100. Cool or what?

Vehicle recovery. Total saving £80 approx
Time saving N/a

So I'm already doing pretty well with the savings. Tyres, plumbing, dishwasher, recovery it all adds up. The other angle of this site however also has to include making money. There will be caravan fees this year at approx £1200 and I have no clue as to where these will come from. We're both hard workers and will meet some of this cost through our wage rises however these are likely to be a lot lower than in previous years. I can feel some sort of part time work coming on. Watch this space....

T

Kitchen sink drama

Tuesday, 17.10 pm, -8 degrees.

We have water problems. The heating cut out. The waste pipe had backed up because it had frozen. This happened last year as well so my wife knew what to do. We disconnected the main waste pipe and left the boiler dripping in to a bucket. The instant the waste pipe was sorted the heating started working again. Mental note: look for ways to stop it freezing up.

Wednesday, 7.10am, -14 degrees.

The taps in the kitchen stop working. The pipes run up the inside of an outside wall and would appear to be frozen. Also there is no hot water anywhere in the house. It's first thing in the morning so we'll sort it out later, after work.

Wednesday 22.10pm, Still -14 and it hasn't got above -4 all day.

Still no water in the kitchen. Still no hot water. Time to look in the garage (under the kitchen) and see what the pipes look like. Trouble. It's 10pm at night and I'm looking at a pipe joint with a beautiful baguette diamond of frozen water between the end of a cold water pipe and the joint. Above this further up the pipe a weld has split but has not been forced appart the way the joint has. Not good. This is mains water. When this thaws there will be a major problem. But it isn't likely to thaw anytime soon.

War summit.

We've both made our work every day through the last two weeks of snow and freezing tempratures. We know that we just can't be phoning a plumber. Under normal circumstances you are talking about a £50 call out charge, £50 per hour (with a minimum of 1 hour) plus materials. In the middle of winter in an emergency you can double those figures.

Decision:

We are both calling in for an emergency half day (possibly full day). The good news is that it's unlikely to suddenly stop being freezing so, although we have burst pipes, we should be able to sort things out quickly and more importantly dryly.

Thursday, 06.50 am, 4 degrees.

The good news is there is no ice to scrape off the car windows. F**K. The undertone in my wifes voice as it says 'I think you better come downstairs' leaves me in no doubt that downstairs will not be good when I get there. I'm trying to wake up but hear this funny hiss behind everything. It gets louder as I go down stairs but everything looks normal. I head to the basement.. You've seen it in a hundred horror movies. Why would you go down there? Why not turn the light on? You know that's where the murderer is waiting to pounce...

Imagine water, under as much pressure as you can possibly exert, blasting against a temporary ceiling and pooling all over the floor. Electric sockets etc are soaking. It's relentless. I think that, given that I'm not even awake yet, I can be forgiven for running about with one thumb in my mouth and the other up my ass for five minutes. I was basically looking for something to turn off. There were taps under the sink that I turned off. They made no difference so I assume that they literally cut the supply to the sink taps above. Is that necessary? There was no water in the kitchen despite it being imediately above the pipe that was jetting water everywhere. When I went below there was nothing to isolate. I followed the pipe back because the kitchen and garage are an extension built on to the house. The water must have been plumbed through the main house at one point. I just cant find it.

I return to the scene. I point out to my wife that the water is escaping up the way rather than down the way. I fear she may look for a tool sharp enough to kill me as she doesn't see what my point is. It would almost be worth shutting up and saving my life here but I'm on to something. The fact that it's very early and my wife is cold wet and angry should not be a reason to hold back with stupid ideas. Should it?

Let's consider the evidence: The kitchen is bone dry despite being only centimeters above the main leak. The garage pipes are the main problem but must be fed from somewhere else as the house was built long before the garage extension. I ask if we have any pipe that we could put over the gusher. Where did that come from? There's about a meter of white plastic tubing hiding in the cellar. OK. That goes over the gusher and then we can point it outside, away from the electrics and ceiling. This is a major turning point. OK so maybe it is expecting too much for me to think that my wife would congratulate this solitary moment of genius.

Nobody says it's good but suddenly we've bought some time. With this extention to the pipe in place the immediate disaster is averted. Water can now be directed away from the house and out into the drive. Don't underestimate the thinking/breathing time this buys. With this pipe jammed between two rungs of a ladder it can actually be left pumping water out into the drive. Believe it or not we can now consider a cup of coffee. This is the fix that costs plumbers thousands. It's harder to charge stupid amounts of money when the burst doesn't look like it's going to bring the house down at any second. What we have now is thinking time.

Now I really wish it had been me. I got to within centimeters of it and can only blame tiredness and panic for letting me miss it but it was my wife who found the stop cock that isolated the water. it was in the farthest darkest corner of the basement. As soon as it was turned fully the water stopped and the world became a better place. The gusher became a trickle and then finally stopped. Phew.

Provided it's accessible repairing stuff like this is no where near as difficult as you think. This is where the wife and I make a great team. I can think up the solution and do the grunt work whilst the wife (sounds male chavanist to call her the wife but I like to keep this site annoymous so can't use names) has the technical skill to cut the pipes and carry out the repairs. A good plumber would have a blow torch and solder and copper joints to carry out the repair however, fortunately for us amatueurs, plastic and rubber now rule the day. You can buy push-fit connections to replace almost any joint. What's more they do exactly what you need them to do. You push them tight and they form a perfect seal.

The moral of the story?? The turning point in our whole saga wasn't the repair. It was finding the stop cock and isolating the water. It was buying ourselves the time to stand back and look at the disater calmly as opposed to panicking. For the next twelve months this blog will be mainly about saving money. Repairing our own plumbing in the middle of winter saved us about £200. You can have all the plumbing skill in the world however it's absolutely useless unless you know where to turn the water off.

What I would like is for every reader of this blog to go now and turn on a cold tap. It could be to a bath or a sink. Turn it on full. Now make the water completely stop running without touching the tap. provided you managed to carry out that simple exercise successfully you are now equipped to deal with plumbing.

I'm still wondering however, how the hell did it get from -14 to 4 degrees over night. Is someone up there picking on us or what?

Total Saving on Plumbing £200 (estimate)

Time taken to fix 3-4 hours
Delay Compared to phoning a plumber: Probably faster.