Pickle was asleep on the radiator shelf and a pan of turkey stock was cooling in the kitchen when I added up the house tab for the last time this year, at 9.40pm on Sunday 28 December. It said £5,648. I looked at it for a while, then checked it again on a calculator, because I'm a payroll officer and a total I haven't checked twice is only an opinion.
The house tab is one page of my budget spreadsheet where every pound spent on the house gets a line. It starts with a £22 carbon monoxide alarm in February and ends with a £119 leak in December. Over eleven months that's about £513 a month, or roughly a quarter again on top of the £22,154 it cost to buy the place. It doesn't include the mortgage, the bills, furniture, curtains or Pickle, who has her own tab and no remorse.
Where it went
I'd kept the tab as one long list in date order. On Sunday evening I sorted it by hand into four groups, which took forty minutes and a short argument with a pivot table.
- Safety and security, £1,125: carbon monoxide alarm £22, new lock cylinders £38 (Matt fitted them), the electrical report £180, the new consumer unit £720 and the interlinked smoke and heat alarms £165.
- Fixing what the survey found, £1,640: the roofer £260, the independent damp survey £250, the front path £85, the gutter £420, the chimney cowls £340 and the bathroom extractor fan £285.
- Making it ours, £1,848: the kitchen refresh £1,160, front bedroom floor sanding £262, woodchip stripping £96, raised beds £96, the fireplace £80, back bedroom paint £58, ethernet £48 and draught-proofing £48.
- Upkeep and surprises, £1,035: the Artex test and overboarding £465, the boiler diverter valve £240, the bath waste and kitchen ceiling £119, the cavity wall camera check £95, the boiler service £85, the bath re-grout £19 and a £12 plug-in energy monitor.
Just under half of it, £2,765, went on safety and on what the survey had flagged. The kitchen on its own was a fifth. I'd have guessed the kitchen was the bigger share, because it's the bit people can see.
Who paid for it
Four pots covered it. £3,306 came from the cash left over after completion, £2,000 from the house fund (£200 a month from March, which hit £2,000 this month), £135 from the boiler pot, which went straight into the diverter valve in December, and about £207 from general savings. I've checked the four totals against the bank statements twice, in case a pound has wandered off.
The verdicts
The biggest surprise was the Artex. We thought we were painting a ceiling and instead we were posting a sample to a lab, getting back the word chrysotile and paying a plasterer £420 to cover it over. The diverter valve was a close second, because it arrived on a night when the garden was at -3°C.
The best value was the £250 independent surveyor, who spent an afternoon with a meter and a tape measure and told us to lower the ground outside by about 150 mm. A damp company had quoted £3,800 for something else entirely. The path cost £85, and the readings have kept falling. I would not skip anything on the safety list. What I'd skip is the speed I painted the kitchen doors, because one door had to be done again and I lost a Sunday and a tin of paint over it.
The mistake that's mine alone is the tab. If I did it again I'd mark every line "planned" or "not planned" the day I typed it, so that I could see how much of a first year is a surprise. My guess from the groups is somewhere around a fifth, but that's a guess. I also found the £38 for the lock cylinders in March, as a receipt in a coat pocket, and typed it in with the wrong date.
The tab for 2026 is open and has no rows yet. I give it until the first week of January.
