Gas and Electricity Key Meters ???????????

Help ! Does anyone have any knowledge about the key/card meters please ? Our new property has both due to the previous owner being in financial difficulty and I have learned that we have to pay to have the meters taken out , at a cost of around £50 per meter. I have never had these type of meters before and have heard they can be quite costly as the power is more expensive to buy per unit than having a regular meter.

Freecycle and other freebies

Good evening and it is a real wet one here , the rain is coming down hard and fast. We are in house mode at the moment. I had a plasterer come over yesterday and give us a quote. I have seen his work and the price was very reasonable, which luckily fell in my budget that I had allocated. Yesterday I was given some old garden slabs. They are large and thick and are quite weighty. I have a little patch by the garden shed and two of these slabs were just the job. Someone told me I could get some new ones for only a fiver each but my budget is tight and I have reused something that was destined for the skip. Besides these are old slabs and seem much better than the ones you get nowadays. Also tonight was another first for us, I looked at Freecycle and saw that someone was offering bark for the garden. The person emailed me back and off we went armed with garden bags to collect the bark. This will be used in a smallish patch we have for underneath some trees. Again our money saved and someone else doesn't have a trip to the tip. It is quite interesting what people offer for free, I shall certainly be keeping an eye on it. The last freebie we had was a book my daughter had wanted from the Eclipse saga. Walking to school a house had a table out front with a sign saying ' please help yourself'. There was lots of books, cassettes ,videos and other bits and pieces all for free. TTFN x

Bathroom Shower

Thank you for all your messages and kind wishes.We are trying to get as many jobs done before we move in. One job was a new bathroom shower , the old one looked ancient. The property had a new bathroom fitted but they had kept the old shower. When we had the new one installed , we found new property surprise number 1. The shower had been sealed onto the wall and not fixed on properly. Also inside the shower it was not wired up correctly so wouldn't have worked ! I had a budget of £100 for a new shower and managed to get one over the Bank Holiday for £69 in the sale. A friend fitted it for free as a nice favour so £31 goes back in the kitty. How many other surprises will I find ?

Piggy gets a new sty

Hi folks and apologies for my lack of contact. Firstly welcome to my new follower Squirmy, thanks for joining. Had lots going on but the big news is that my house has completed. I am now a homeowner once more back at the start of a new mortgage term of 25 years :-( however this mortgage unlike my other allows me to overpay so I will be taking advantage and hoping to bring the balance and the term down. An on line calculator has told me that if I overpay by £100 pcm it would knock £27k off the balance and five years off the term, sounds good ! It has taken years to get to this point but now we can move on and enjoy our new family home, a bigger house in a better area. Don't get me wrong its not huge, its just bigger than what we had before. We now have three bedrooms, garage, driveway, utility room and conservatory as well as kitchen , dining room and lounge. We also have a hall which we never had before and stairs with banister and spindles ! You are probably thinking how sad but our last home was a small two bed terrace with not much space at all. My frugal journey continues with the exercise of getting the house ready to move into. More on that another time ! Have a great weekend, TTFN x

Untitled

Hello and welcome to my new followers Squirmy and Catherine Brown, thank you both for joining.

Its one of those months I'm afraid, not much to say and when I do its moans. At the moment I am considering applying for a promotion at work, just weighing up the pro's and con's. It will be much more work for not much more money however it is a chance to learn new skills , get experience in another area and work at a higher grade. It is also a change of scenery which would be a good thing. I am cautious of jumping out of the frying pan into the fire but it could turn out good, if you don't take a risk you will never know ?

Also I am stuck in limbo solicitor land. The house we made an offer on is dragging and dragging. My solicitor is ready to go and so is my bank, the other party however are on a permanent go slow. Strange really as they wanted to complete within four weeks. We will wait and see..........

Weekend Whoopsies

Its been really wet and horrible here today, its hard to believe that its May next week, where is the sunshine ?

I managed to have three big bags of shopping today for £10.02, and the freezers filling up again but I can't resist the reductions. Luckily we caught the shops at just the right time, here's what I snapped up;

Sainsburys £5.49;

Sausages........................................... 30p from £1.29
Two cheese and potato bakes............50p each from £2.15 each
Two packs of Asparagus...................50p each from £2 each
Limoncello Cake...............................99p from £4.79
2 cheese and potato pies....................50p each from £1.89 each
Cream Horns......................................40p from £1.50
Pork pies............................................50p from £2.12
English muffins.................................30p from 80p

Waitrose £4.53;

Two packs of Aloo Gobi Saag ...............................39p each reduced from £2.09 each
Seven curries, Jalfrezi, Tikka Masala and Korma...39p each reduced from £4.17 each
Single Cream ..........................................................25p from £1
5 pack of sesame seed bagels..................................39p from £1.31
Houmous.................................................................19p from £1.67
Smoked salmon pate................................................19p from £1.67

This should have cost £61.60 purchased earlier in the day. A few minutes earlier and I could have snapped up the reduced fresh meat, some students beat me to it and made their way off to the tills with baskets full of chicken breasts at 59p each from £5. .... TTFN xx

Meal out

Hello and welcome to a new follower ' Cheap Chick', thank you for joining.

Feeling a bit of cabin fever this week as I have not gone out at all. My daughter was sleeping over at a relatives last night so my husband decided we could go out for a meal, partly for a treat but partly because he has been head chef all this week. We went to a local Indian restaurant where we have been before. However last night it was really busy, they had two big parties in there. Consequently it took us almost two hours to have our starter and our main. The food was nice but it took too long. The starter took nearly an hour to come out but this is where common sense should kick in. If I was the owner would send over a few complimentary poppadoms, smile and explain the delay, try and keep people happy and distracted so they are not ravenous by the time the food arrives. After we ate the food I must admit I didn't feel full, and the bill was over £30. Years ago I would have not given that a second thought but nowadays I do feel cheated. Never mind :-(