Owning your own home

not bad .. will look into, ideally in spring I guess ..

If the eight grand isn't coming out of the sinking fund, run a fucking mile.

Good advice. Will fidn this out. Appreciated.

Best of luck with all that BleakRefs.

Thanks for the congrats backslaps. I'm starting to allow myself to get excited now. A week today.

Faversham does seem like a cool town. Has the the creek, the marshes and nature reserves right on the doorstep for cycling and running round and the coast is 10 mins drive. It's got the brewery, some decent eateries, a beer and cider festival, great live (mainly folk) music scene, decent town center, It's got a banjo shop ffs! Schools are good and we're 2 mins from the station. The commute is just over an hour on the high speed on which I get a discount so I'm hoping to always get a seat and I've got the Brompton for the other end. No tubing it for me.

First roast dinner and bottle of wine and cozying up round the wood burner and going to seem all the more special for having been 10 months in the making. It has not been a smooth road.

Faversham is jolly pretty, but beware the locals:
http://www.ilivehere.co.uk/chavershamfaversham.html

The comments. Priceless.

didn't really factor any of this into my decision when i got the front done. it was 1) will it look good, yes, and 2) can i afford it? yes. not sure how you go about quantifying 2-5% additional house price increase. sometimes its not all about 'adding value' ;-)

Prompted by pebble dash chat. Figure someone here will know - rough cost for repointing in lime? Medium sized 2-storey house (guess 5.5m wide), I just want the back doing, the side seems okay and the front is rendered and I'm not dealing with that yet...
But I want it done properly in lime, think it's currently cement but originally lime. Very wary of power tools for cutting out the cement, but not sure how realistic it is to find someone willing to do it by hand or how much it would cost...

i know a bloke in forest gate who paid to have the pebbledash removed from his gaff. it was going very well until the blokes doing it called him one day, and said, mate, you've got breezeblocks in the front of your house in several places. and lots of cracks too. turned out it had suffered minor bomb damage in the war and had been patched up and repaired lolz.

I like a nice bit of pebble dash - if it's smallish stones in natural render. I hate it when it's really lumpy and been thickly overpainted like it has on the front of our house (whitewash is acceptable).

I can find that for you - I'm having it done to mine right now. The cement mortar has to be raked out to a fair old depth (it can be done with power tools) which creates a lot of dust, and the repointing is slow and steady work.

You'll need to factor in the cost of scaffolding and dust shrouds too.
Just don't use my builder. He's already taken on too much work!

That would be great, thanks. Ballpark is all I'm after. I like to have some idea what to expect before getting quotes, especially if quotes is pointless without another year saving the cash.

I looked at houses that had sold in similar areas/similar condition - which had or didn't have pebble dashing.

my house has the horrible rough cast render. the only one in a lovely terrace of brick houses.

be wary of what was said above - most of the time, what's underneath is a long way from the lovely brick faces of the neighbours' unrendered walls.

Yeah I'm aware it can cover a multitude of flaws.
Most of our road is rough rendered - I suspect that means they were all built with crappy bricks. Not planning on investigating that anytime soon. Re-pointing the already exposed bricks is first up.

Anyone in need of a temporary sofa or futon base? It's a futon oak frame with some bust bits where the folding mechanism happens. Could be repaired if anyone had the inclination.

Or the futon part of it could be used as a temp bed, it's 10 years old but not too hard. Would be improved by a good kicking / airing.

Would need collecting from E17, otherwise will be going down the tip with it.

Just thought it might come in handy for new house buying folk.

The go-to guy in Leyton / Leytonstone is Mahon. Online somewhere.

Makes sense to stick with lime mortar as suggested before. You can have your existing mortar colour-matched if you want to by sending a sample to wherever it was I got my mortar online. I think they were called Conserve possibly.

Think it's about £35 psqm, maybe excluding scaffolding.

The estimate we have was £5 materials and £40 labour per brick.
with 125 bricks that's £5625

We did the garden walls in the summer, got a couple of unskilled mates to hack out the existing pointing then a couple of skilled guys to do the pointing. I'm fairly sure it was about £40psqm in total which was around the quote from a skilled builder. £40 per brick is mad, that's 2 hours of skilled labour per brick.

I'll count my bricks but that seems to be some fairly wide variance :/
Well, good to know the top end and the achievable end.

Got a quote from them and then the one that @princeperch put me in touch with. The later was significantly cheaper and they've done work on houses around the corner from me. We'll be getting it done potentially before xmas.

Post some before and after shots. I need my bricks stripping next year.

The comments. Priceless.

That is pretty funny. We have friends there already who moved to upmarket Fav to get away from the decidedly worse Sittingbourne.

maybe it was sqm it says "per unit"

That would make sense