Owning your own home

We went Venetian blinds downstairs (much cheaper than shutters and more convenient) and Roman blinds upstairs (not so cheap).

Went motorised for the Roman blinds as opening and closing 4 of them by hand takes ages.

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I pay £306/quarter to rent an identical garage a little further down the row from the two in question.

Our flat was meant to have a garage, when it didn’t they knocked £5k off the price- this was ten years ago, I’d say a garage would add £10k to the flat easily now, maybe £15k.

Blinds look nice. We have hideous mismatched ones that keep breaking. Where’d you get these?
Wife is slowly twisting my arm with slatted shutters... they are practical...

Planning to move my radiators under the bay window, probably 3 of these in series, any potentially issues with that?

This is what we did, no issue. They ended up quite tight for space in the curve so the pipework was a little bit fussier than ideal, but it all worked in the end.

Do you mean plantation shutters?

I see you

Just asking an innocent question

IMO Curtains. Much hyggier. Blinds always seem a bit clinical to me.

I think I would like to do that too. Yours looked nice. I'll add it to the list.

Good to hear. From what I've read it's fine as long as you connect between tops and bottoms, so the water can circulate properly. I'll speak to the plumber about chrome tails between them.

@villa-ru, that's my thinking, tuck behind the curtains in winter (although this may get annoying, I think I've just picked it up from my parents) and thinking about it, we just have small top openers in UPVC, so really don't want to obscure any airflow in summer.

They look really good.

We really need better (insulated and not rotten) windows but they're just so expensive.

Blinds that rise from the bottom. By far the best blind solution. We usually have ours halfway up, privacy but let’s light in.

On the life insurance question (and maybe one for a different thread but interest has been piqued). I have two life policies through work both for 5 x salary (so does my wife). In general I dislike the insurance industry and am in agreement with Dov about it being essentially a fixed racket. That said I'm wondering if I shouldn't consider critical illness or something else, I'm fit and healthy and my wife's salary can pay mortgage and support us just about but yeah just in case I suppose

This is how they get you mate. Don't be scared. LIVE ON THE EDGE.

Srsly though. Everyone needs to mange their own risk.

Everest weren't the cheapest, true. These were £14k all in (including install, scaffold etc). The non sash option would have been about £10k. But then these are all about 6ft tall with the narrowest one over 2ft wide. There were 11 of them and most of them needed the old sash box and mechanism removed which was an extra cost.

We're a corner house with square bays on two sides - I think we had quotes that were about the same but I think I'd need a scratchcard win before we could go there.

Nice-looking sash windows like yours would be a non-negotiable though.

Ours needed totally replaced and we had factored that in when buying (along with everything else, the shocking windows meant we could afford the purchase price). The extra £4k has kind of been lost amongst everything else. We went for sash just because I think they look nicer, not out of any deference to the period nature of the house. Ours is the end of a terrace of four mirrored/identical houses. Next door still has the original sashes, but they have been maintained. The other two houses have really ugly uPVC. Not just because they are uPVC, just really weird choice of pattern and opening panes.

Even in these couple of days, the stats for our Tado valves show the heating coming on much less frequently to keep the same temp.

yeah for sure dude. reckon timing wise will be in a position to give a bit of a review of it by the time you are round to it.

and yeah when all this madness is over you should by when you are passing. i know you must come up this way a bit to see family in Norfolk.

will update in here when we actually start getting the thing installed. mainly trying to sort windows at the moment.

This is the data from the Bedroom TRV. The windows in there were installed on Tuesday. The lower temp in the middle of the day will be when there was a massive fucking hole in the wall while they swapped the windows. Then in the evening, the rad had to make up for that colder temp. But Wednesday shows it coming on less frequently in the morning (it's off during the day) then it was less intense to bring it back up in the evening.

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That's really interesting about the tado analytics - I hadn't dived into them yet but on first look it seems that the underfloor heating in our downstairs isn't using much energy to get up to a higher temperature, and then is stable for a really long time. Compared to a room upstairs which is on a rad - that seems to need to be on consistently to maintain the room temperature.

We need roof insulation in our loft rooms before we can think about windows, probably.

I think the key message here is - if you can afford a Victorian end-of-terrace house, the house is full of problems.

I knew there would be a huge difference just by how often I could hear the TRV actuating before when the heat it had just dumped into the room fucked off out the shit windows.

Even in these couple of days, the stats for our Tado valves show the heating coming on much less frequently to keep the same temp.

It has been much warmer the past couple of days. My heating has been firing less too.