On Saturday morning I scrolled to the bottom of the house tab and the total said £10,028. I said it out loud. Pickle left the room.
It is twenty months since 31 January 2025, and the tab has two halves: £5,648 for 2025, which I wrote about in December, and £4,380 so far this year, of which £2,900 is one wall. That works out at about £500 a month. It's more than I'd have guessed when we got the keys and less than I'd have feared in the first cold February. Looking back over all of it, the jobs fall into three piles, and a few won't stay in any of them.
What changed how the house feels
- The consumer unit, £720. You can't see it, and it's the job I'd name first. There's a neat white box under the stairs with every circuit labelled, and I stopped thinking about the old fuse board the day it went in.
- The front room without woodchip, £96. Under it were orange paper from the 1970s and somebody's pencil sums. The room is lighter in every sense.
- The front bedroom floor, £262, and the hall parquet, £96. Bare boards that Matt sanded in a heatwave, and a hall that now echoes. I like the echo.
- The back bedroom wall, £790. It lost 6 cm of room, and the corner that used to read 12°C on a cold morning reads about 17°C. No mould since May. The real test is January.
- The front door, £58. The most visible £58 I have ever spent, and Maureen approves.
What saved money
The cheapest changes did the most. Turning the boiler's flow temperature down to 55°C cost nothing, and our gas has gone from Dennis's estimated 14,200 kWh a year to 10,420. A cooler house, a mended gutter and draught-proofing all had a hand in that, so I won't give the dial all the credit. The water meter was free and took the water bill from £49.60 to about £28.50 a month. The draught-proofing was £48 and I can't prove a penny of it, but I trust a candle flame that leans sideways at the front door.
The independent damp survey was £250 and the path £85, against a quote of £3,800 for an injected damp-proof course that would have fixed a problem we didn't have. The £95 camera check in the cavity walls is the one I'd defend hardest. It let us say no to £2,600 with a reason.
What I regret
There are three, plus one. I painted the kitchen doors too quickly in 2025 and lost a Sunday and a tin of paint. I never saw the back gutter in the rain before we bought the house, and the £420 repair and the mould corner were the bill for that. Matt paused the drum sander by the front bedroom window and left a gouge you can find with your thumb. The plus one is the magnetic filter, which I put off for eighteen months after the engineer said we should have one. None of them was expensive on its own. Two came from rushing and two from not looking, or not acting, when I should have.
Not everything fits a pile. The kitchen refresh, £1,160, bought us roughly two years of not hating the room, which at about £48 a month is fair. The pressure washer I bought in a sale in our second week is still in its box, so I count it as a house project that never started.
What's next
The kitchen is still on the list for 2027, though after the wall "on the list" is doing more work than it was in April. The loft top-up comes when the last of the moving boxes leave the loft, which has been "next month" since 2025. The peach bathroom will go eventually. I've started to think of it as a character rather than a problem, and I'm giving it until the kitchen's finished.
The tab for 2027 opens in January. I'd quite like the first line in it to be small.
