On Sunday night, day 59 of owning the house, I opened the house tab and found it stood at £1,306. Of that, £1,065 was electrics. The most useful thing we have bought since we moved in cost £8.
The £8 thing
It's a head torch, from Screwfix, in a pack with a spare set of batteries. It exists because on our first Sunday Matt was lying under the kitchen sink with his phone torch between his teeth, looking for the isolation valve, and the phone slid out of his mouth and into a bucket. It now lives on a hook by the front door and earns its keep every single day. The meter cupboard under the stairs has no light. The loft has one bulb that works when it feels like it. The valves under the sink are right at the back, behind a bottle of bleach, and the gas meter box on the front wall is a blind spot after about 6pm.
Between us we have worn it to read both meters, to find the stopcock in week one and to peer behind the washing machine. On a typical evening one of us is wearing it. Matt wears it when he's looking at something he doesn't strictly need to look at.
The £90 thing
In week two I bought a pressure washer in a sale, £90 down from £140, because the front path had gone green and slippery after a wet fortnight. It is still in its box in the shed, taped shut, under Matt's workbench. I did make a case for it in the spreadsheet, in a column called "cost per use", and that figure is currently infinite. Matt has not said a word about it, which is worse than if he had. He says it will pay for itself the day we have to clean something large. So far nothing has been large enough.
What we broke
In week three I was carrying a box of kitchen things up to the loft and swung it into the landing light switch. The plastic cover cracked clean across. The electricians who fitted the consumer unit on 14 March had a spare in the van and charged me £3 for it, which is still the cheapest repair on the tab and the one I think about most whenever I flick the landing light.
Matt has broken nothing, and he would like that on the record. He has, however, lost a pencil behind the washing machine and a 10 mm socket somewhere in the loft. The loft is half boarded and half full of our moving boxes, so the socket may be up there until we find it, or until someone moves house again.
What we haven't needed
- A second sofa. The first one went in through the back door and is the only sofa the front room has space for. Guests get the sofa bed in the back room.
- Curtains for the back room. The front room and bedrooms have proper curtains now, after a month of sheets and drawing pins. In the back room we eat at the table with the big light on and do not care who is watching.
- A lawnmower. The garden is mostly stone steps and three strips of grass, and Matt trims them with hand shears the way you'd cut a toddler's hair.
- A ladder of our own. Jas across the road has lent us one already, and has hinted that a longer one is available when we are ready to be frightened.
The roofer is booked for Thursday, which is a story for another day. The £22 kettle we bought on the way to collect the keys is not on the house tab, which is the only reason it doesn't win this list. It is still on the worktop, and it will probably outlast the worktop.
