I Had To Smile...............

............. the other day when I said  downsizing meant I could now afford the dentist bill, an  "Anonymous" commented  telling me how wrong it was to boast about the size of the house I sold and to mention finances......... at least I think it was what they said. I deleted it so quickly that I can't really remember the gist! As Sue said Anonymous snarky comments get short shrift here and are a real waste of Anon's time.

So I thought I'd share this photo copy of  press cutting with you -  It's all about improving property to make a profit so as to move up the housing ladder - lots of boasting about making money here!

 Don't think this has been on the blog before.

It dates from the late 90's  and The Stepping Stones feature was in one of the Sunday papers that our neighbour used to pass to us for fire lighting. I noticed it as it said they awarded £100 for the "best" one. Someone came out to take the photo - of me with two goats and it appeared in the paper a few weeks later. We never did get any money for it being featured!

 

There you go Mr/Mrs or Ms Anonymous - how's that for boasting!! Or as my Mum would have said "put that in your pipe and smoke it!!"

(but thank you for giving me an idea for a blog post 😛)

Back Tomorrow

Sue

This is Me

I needed to fill a blog post so I'm unashamedly copying something Sue-in-Wales/England did the other week.

This is me aged about one I think - born with black hair. Big fireguard around the open fire and a very 1950's sofa in the living room of the house in Haughley, Suffolk that was my home for 20 years.

1961 aged 6  - back left -  with my little sister and our cousins. We're on holiday in Norfolk. People didn't go far for holidays then

1962, 7 years old and being a bridesmaid. Red velvet dress with gold sash. I wonder how they fixed that head dress on my hair which was always too straight and short for hairclips?

 Then there's a gap, I don't seem to have many photos of myself for lots of years. I know I was given a little camera when I was about 9 and have lots of tiny photos that I took of other people.

So  1969 aged 14 in summer school uniform for Stowmarket Grammar School. The dress was sort of pink/red and white stripes, I seem to have a heck of a lot of hair! Still black. I'm standing beside our house, same house as the first picture, we didn't have much of a  proper garden  as Dad was a builder so round the back of the house was a builders yard with shed, heaps of sand and bricks and everything else a general builder would need for building houses.

And a couple of years later in the new 6th form uniform, navy skirt, cream shirt that I never wore at school. I was ready to go back but had applied for a job as a library assistant in Bury St Edmunds Library during the summer holidays and the O Level results were late out. I needed English and Maths and 3 other O levels for the job. I got the grades, got the job and never regretted it.

Not many people have seen this photo since 1975........ aged 20 and getting married to first husband. We'd met  both aged 16, engaged at 18 and married at 20 - that's what you did back then if you wanted to get away from the family home and hadn't been to university. We split and divorced in 1978. I chucked all the other wedding photos. I don't regret getting married  then because if I'd not been with P I would never have met Colin. P and I had different ideas about life while me and Col were on the same wavelength. Plus it got me on the housing ladder 3 years earlier than it would have done - which was a huge help when house prices shot up at the same time! ( After me P married and divorced twice more and has no contact with his two sons and grandchildren- Sad.)

 And here I am with Col, the beginning of 38 wonderful years of 3 children, 6 houses and a smallholding!
 Why the heck he chose such a light coloured suit - it was sort of pale beige - I have no idea. I didn't know until he picked me up on the morning of the wedding. He never wore it again and I never stopped reminding him about it!

And the only recent photo that I actually don't mind people seeing. At Son and DiL's wedding in 2016. The hair's a lot greyer and I'm a lot fatter!

Back Tomorrow
Sue

Speaking at the Big WI

At W.I's all around the country May is Resolutions month. Instead of a speaker we discuss the Resolutions that have been decided on to be put forward at the National AGM. The W.I is a campaigning organisation. Every year all groups can put forward suggestions which they feel strongly about, then these are whittled down to 1 or 2 which each WI debates and tells their representative how to vote at the AGM .(More about this years resolutions next week)

This doesn't take very long and to fill up the evening Big WI  ask 3 members to talk about something interesting in their lives, somehow I agreed to take part this year and decided to talk about how we kept moving and renovating houses so that we could buy a smallholding.
To make it a bit more interesting I printed out some photos that could be handed round as I spoke.

The other two ladies had had careers, one as a podiatrist and entrepreneur and the other first as a nurse and then working with clinical trials for new drugs. They had both written down what they would say and read their bits but I decide to go freestyle and printed out photos of some interesting pictures from the house we renovated and then at the smallholding and used those as prompts to talk about our life of moving up the housing ladder from a two up two down end terrace with garden to 5 acres. I wasn't nervous but found my voice going all shaky - not like me at all! at least my knees didn't knock!

The first 3 photos are of the house we brought from being "unfit for human habitation" to a lovely home in 1984/5. Taking 2 children under 4 to live in a caravan while the work was done. Mostly by Colin in the evenings and weekends.

Then I had 2 photos of what a mess the smallholding was when we bought it in 1992, that was 7 years and two more houses later than Appletree Cottage above

A photocopy from the newspaper when we were interviewed to promote the Suffolk Smallholders Society in 1998

How the smallholding garden and campsite looked in 2013. After 21 years of fun and much hard work.

Then I had a couple of photos that were taken for my old blog of the stall we had at the front gate with some of the things we grew to sell and a photo of some of the fruit we grew. Raspberries, redcurrants and apricots.

I think all the ladies enjoyed hearing our house moving story and seeing the photos......... They said they did or maybe they were just being polite!


Thank you to everyone for comments about the colours of the trees up the lane and around my meadow. The tree that I didn't know down the lane in a neighbours garden is definitely not a Goat Willow, I have one of those at the end of the garden and we had several at the smallholding. I went back down the lane and zoomed in for a better look and have decided that looking at the leaves with their red stems that it's a type of ornamental cherry, one that gets very big!

Welcome to some more followers, hope you enjoy reading


Back Tomorrow
Sue

Where We Once Lived

Last Saturday there was a garage sale event in the village where we lived in the 80's, it's only a couple of miles away so we went to have a look.
We were expecting about 30 houses in the village to have sales but there were only a dozen so it didn't take long to look round. I got a couple of things for grandchildren for £2.20 ( I think Jacob will love that lift out shape puzzle) Book and cars for Florence - she's 1 next week -good grief!

and a box of  3½ dozen new small jars - with lids for £2. Col said they might come in handy for miniature portions of marmalade, I think they would sell well somewhere else! The David Gentleman book for £1 which will go in my next Ziffit box as it's worth nearly £4 to them.

I took a couple of photos of the places we lived, everywhere looks a bit untidy and run-down now, even the village sign needs a coat of paint.

This is where we lived between 1980 and 83. There was quite a community of mums with young children who used to play on this area. The houses were built in the 70s so were fairly new then. Now the whole road just looks very tatty.

Between 1983 and 1986 we lived in the next village where we renovated an old house before moving back to this bungalow at the end of a close, where we stayed for five years between 1986 and 1991. Cars parked everywhere and new houses squashed into small spaces is the overall impression of the village.

 What was strange was how many people we saw who still live in the same houses they lived in back then whereas we've been right across to the Suffolk coast for 23 years and then back again. I'm so glad we didn't stay in the village and wouldn't want to live there now, much too busy!

Thanks for comments and thoughts on the frugal bits of September in yesterdays post.


Back Soon
Sue

Personal Spending

When we got married I'd already been running a home for 3 years. Col had been living with his parents. He moved into my house and we pooled our income. I carried on sorting the finances and worked out what we could afford, he had what money he needed for his expenses and I looked after the rest. We changed our bank account to joint names and put the house in joint names too. That's what marriage was back then - something shared.
It wasn't long before our eldest daughter arrived on the scene and we had one wage. There was no question of it being "his" money just because he was the only one working. We managed on a council road-man's wages because we had to. The only way to manage was to keep close check on spending, do things to earn extra or to save money. The most important things were to pay the mortgage, pay the household bills and have enough to eat. Nothing was left for "personal spending". I don't think the words had been invented!

It worries me now to see young couples arguing over their spending - "his money does this" or "her money pays for that". or "you're not paying your share".  And NOT just young couples, lot's of older people still keep their money completely separate. Sometimes one doesn't know what the other earns.
It sound almost Victorian and wouldn't have worked for us as I didn't earn anything!
 Twenty years on and the campsite was in my name but I never thought of it as my money. I had to keep accounts for the tax man - so I knew what the campsite made, but it wasn't kept separate just for me, that would have been silly. We wanted to pay off the mortgage - the JOINT mortgage so that Col could retire early. Fast forward to 2009 and my Dad left me some money but I didn't think of it as my money it went into joint savings and to build the extension on the house. Now once again all the money coming in is in Colin's name - his County Council pension and his Employment and Support allowance, but it's still our money - going into a joint account and coming out again for whatever we need.

So I've never really had any personal spending money, I've never needed to have any separate money just for me. It's still OUR house and OUR bills. As long as I have a few pounds to take to car boot sales I'm a happy bunny!

Maybe we are odd, but it worked for us. 

Back Soon
Sue

 

Our Story Continued from Yesterday

From 1992 up to the present.

So there we were May 5th 1992 at last on our own smallholding.There were two reasons it was the cheapest 5 acres in Suffolk first  it was a mess and very run down and secondly there were two huge pylons from the sizewell power station just over the boundary at the end of our field.
We spent the first two weeks living in our touring caravan because the house had to be completely rewired before the building society would release all the mortgage money. Before we could move the caravan in we had to cut the grass around the house, which was a foot tall in places, so that we could find a level place to park.
 The chalet bungalow had been built in 1955 and had had no money spent on it in the 30+ years. There were several old buildings and a 4 acre overgrown field. The first month we were there we asked a local farmer to cut the hay meadow, but he refused saying he didn't know what rubbish was laying about among the long grass and we later pulled out lengths of wire and old machinery.

This aerial photo is from the early spring of 1993 a year after moving in,the digger was there putting in a new septic tank and one for the campsite too. By this time we had re-roofed the house and a start was soon made on vegetable gardens and much of the mess had been cleared. There were 2 old caravans on the land that had to be knocked to bits and scrapped, 3 Farm buildings full of rubbish, some cold frames that had collapsed and everywhere bits of broken glass. Broken, we were told, by the alcoholic man when in a rage!

And this below from about 2002/3 not sure which without more research.

Over our 23 years there we kept goats and sheep, chickens by the hundred and pigs now and again. We planted well over 250 trees and became almost self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables, milk and meat and also heating the house with wood. We replaced the old buildings with modern and there was soon no sign of what a mess the place had been. The campsite - A Camping and Caravanning Club 5 van site was started in 1994, became well established and after adding new toilets, shower and recreation room we were very busy, often full at weekends and through the summer holidays.

In 1992 when we bought the smallholding it was the done thing to have an interest only mortgage and an insurance to pay off the balance at the end. Around about 1998ish we started getting letters from the building society warning that there wouldn't be enough money in the insurance to pay off the mortgage. So we changed to a repayment mortgage and set about paying it off early. It was around this time that interest rates shot up to 16% for a while. Obviously to do this is meant being frugal, but of course after all these years we were old hands at managing on a small budget. We found that if we saved all pennies and spare pounds until we had £500 we could make a repayment of the capital. Then we would write a letter asking for a year to be taken off the mortgage term ( I don't know if this is still possible nowadays but I would recommend finding out because if it is then this is a AMAZING way to pay off mortgages quickly). In this way we'd paid for the smallholding by 2007. Ten Years Early!
 Our Children grew, the eldest two went through university and then left home and the youngest moved out too in 2005.
When my Dad died and left us some money we spent a lot of it in 2011 building an extension to the bungalow with a lovely big kitchen and upstairs master bedroom with en-suite. The rest of the house was re-configured at the same time and we also added a conservatory.
Col carried on working as a Bridge Inspector for the County Council but once we paid off the mortgage and then saved a bit of money, he had a plan to retire at age 55 in March 2012 and earn a living from the campsite, smallholding and odd-jobbing. And that's just what he did, although carried on for another year working for the council one day a week.

We had a busy year in 2012/13 getting the things that would earn us money more established and all was going well. Then in the summer of 2013 having rarely had a day off all his working life Col had health problems which ended up with him needing stents fitted to prevent a heart attack. Although this was sorted we had to slow down a bit on what we were doing and in June 2015 decided to put the smallholding up for sale so we could have a change of lifestyle. We hadn't been able to have a holiday during the summer for many years and with the campsite so busy it was difficult to even get a day off between May and September ........... we bought a cheap touring caravan off ebay and lots of travelling was planned.
 It took an age to find a buyer for the smallholding, not everyone was willing to take it on or to live with pylons so close .........so it was November 2015 before we had a buyer and then we  soon found a small  bungalow to live in while travelling. But  things got delayed and it took even longer to get everything sorted. Unfortunately by November more heath issues had appeared although we didn't know what they were.

Thought at first to be some sort of anemia or stomach ulcer, Col was diagnosed with Mantle Cell Non Hodgkins Lymphoma in January 2016, and we started the regular trips to hospital. Our buyers delayed things a lot and we finally got moved to the small bungalow in Ipswich in March 2016 and he spent until October 2016 having treatment which seemed to be working. After just a few months in town we knew it wasn't really for us and  we also realised we probably wouldn't  travel as much as we planned and then in October, when we thought he was going to get well again, we spotted a cottage in a lovely position down a lane in Mid Suffolk and knew it was just what we wanted. But  a few weeks later Col was told his treatment hadn't worked and he  was put on a different sort of chemo tablet. By then we were so hooked on the cottage we decided to carry on with the purchase but once again moving was delayed by a mix up at the solicitors, so that only  3 days after moving in on 1st March we were told  the new tablets were not working either and they would try a radical new untested drug.

So here we are in the cottage at the end of a lane in a very quiet part of Suffolk, still going through the ups and downs of chemo tablets and hoping for a donor stem cell replacement later this summer - Fingers crossed that it works.

Back Soon
Sue

Repeating and Updating an Old Post

 Right back at the beginning of my old Blog I wrote about how we came to be living on a 5 acre smallholding.
Lots of people who read this blog weren't reading then so I thought it worth repeating and updating to tell how and why we are now living in a cottage on an acre, and while I was doing that I decided to add some photos of our biggest house refurbishment.
Photos and Italics have been added to the original post.
C is Colin obviously!

It all started back in 1978 when, for £8,000,  I bought a tiny 2 bed Victorian end terraced house in Stowmarket in Suffolk using a £2000 mortgage and half the house money I got after a very short marriage and a quick divorce.  The house had no bathroom, just a shower which had been chopped off one of the small bedrooms. The kitchen and toilet had been built onto the back of the house and were a bit tatty. What the house did have was a long narrow vegetable garden and some gooseberry bushes and a rhubarb plant. That was when I started growing stuff and making jam, and luckily it was only a short cycle ride to the library where I was working.
When C and I got married he moved in and used a moped to get to work where he was  a council road man. They did things like sweeping paths and clearing out drainage channels at the edge of the road. The pay wasn't much and my pay as a library assistant was also a long way down the County Council pay-scale too. We had gas connected to the house as it was already along the road outside and tidied up the kitchen.
Then I had our eldest daughter, so we were down to one small pay cheque, we grew more vegetables and I learned how to make jam and chutney and we bought everything secondhand.
Once I stopped work it made more sense to move to the village where the council depot was, so C could bike to work. We were very lucky because house prices were beginning to shoot up and we sold it to a single bloke who wanted to get on the housing ladder for £14,000. That's how mad the housing market was, almost double in 2 and a bit years!
We found a modern 3 bed end terrace that was going cheap because it Stank! The lady bred cats and cooked up fish and liver all the time, the neighbours had complained and the worst of it was she was a health visitor! It was £16,000 so we had to have a bigger mortgage but mortgages were easy to get then.
We also had to have a bridging loan to give us time to strip all the wood from the house and re paint everywhere. C and my dad did all the work and Dad helped by putting in a Parkray fire with a back boiler and a couple of radiators as there was no heating in the house apart from an open fire. We had an allotment and then two because by then we had worked out the only way to manage was to grow all our own stuff. I used to keep a strict check on what electric we used, we stocked up on coal in the summer when it was cheap, bought things secondhand and took care to economise wherever we could. Cloth nappies come to mind and walking everywhere in the village.
C worked overtime in the summer doing road resurfacing and in the winter on the gritter lorries. During this time he had changed to a being a Ganger, which meant being in charge of a three man gang and driving the lorry which gave us a few extra pounds a week.
Our next move was 3 years later, just 2 miles to the next village, by which time we had a son too. We sold the house for £20,000 and everyone thought we were mad as we took two children under 4 to live in a caravan while we did up a house.

Colin would get home from work and after a meal would be working on the house 'til 9 each night. These 6 photos show what we bought and a bit of the work involved. What we didn't get a photo of at the time was the whole place as a skeleton, because the tiles were off too for a while. The house was semi detached and the other half was being renovated at the same time by a young couple. On the bottom left photo you can just see a corner of the caravan we lived in through a very cold winter. No heating in the caravan except a propane gas mobile heater and a convector heater. And no-one caught a cold all year!
Top right and middle right are the back of the house where we built a new extension of kitchen and cloakroom downstairs and bathroom and bedroom upstairs and that skinny young fella is Colin aged around 25! He is as thin as that again now - but not by choice.


 The house was so bad that it had been declared unfit for habitation but a council grant of £10,000 was available for anyone restoring it. The thing we liked was that it had quarter acre of land at the front. We paid £10,000 for it and got a mortgage which they paid out a bit at a time as the work was done. C did a lot of the work, and I helped when I could. The house was stripped back to timber beams, we ( and yes I say we as that was one of the jobs I could and did help with every time the children were asleep) had to dig out 2 foot of dirt floor to get the room height and all the walls had to be underpinned. My dad was able to do the extension ( he was a builder) and plumbing for us.
When our daughter started school I would bike the 2 miles there and back with 2 children on the bike because we couldn't afford very much petrol for the car. We started keeping chickens here and selling the eggs to neighbours.
After a year C got a better job in the council as a supervising foreman, looking after all the gangs who looked after the roads. He was now supervising the winter gritting so we had to stay within 8 miles of the council base to be available for emergencies.
By the time our son was 3 and going to playschool  I was biking up or down that 2 mile road 6 times a day ! and also working as a cleaner when the children were at school and playschool. So we decided to move back to the village where the school was. The house sold for £40,000 again doubling in 3 years because house prices were rising so fast.
We found a bungalow with ½ an acre of land in the village for £42,000, so we had to stretch to a bigger mortgage again. Cs pay was still very average and we always had to make do with what we had, no foreign holidays etc. etc. We built a utility room on the side of the bungalow and an extension out the back- again C did most of the work and then I had our youngest daughter. The bungalow was tucked in at the end of a cul-de-sac with several noisy neighbours, it was OK but not where we wanted to stay. When both children were at school before I had our youngest, I did part time work as a school dinner lady also selling herbs and picking fruit for a fruit farm.
But then we had 2 bits of good fortune. One was C got the job of County Council Bridge Inspector, which was based in Ipswich and didn't have to be tied to where we lived in Mid Suffolk (one of the reasons that he got the job was because no-one with engineering qualifications would take it because the pay was too low!) and secondly we realised that the back garden which had a way into it from a small lane could be sold for a building plot. So after 5 years we sold the house for £71,000 moved into a rented place back in the town we had started from and looked for a smallholding. The children were 11, 9 and 4 by then and for 6 months I home educated rather than change schools twice.
We soon found the smallholding owned by a mad woman and an alcoholic! It was a tip! and cost us £85,000 in 1992, We had to have a bigger mortgage again but thought we could manage it.

So that's how in May 1992 we came to own 5 acres in Suffolk and a 4 bedroom Chalet bungalow.

TO BE CONTINUED..............................................

SOON
Sue