Yesterday evening I went around and moved all the ground floor windows that were locked in 'slightly open' to the 'fully closed' position. The heating is not yet on though I am beginning to wear jumpers in the evening. It will be interesting to see how our gas consumption changes this winter compared to last year, with the double-glazing in everywhere.

Today I've been playing around with figures from my accounting program (Accountz), partly prompted by coming surprisingly high in the IFS "Where do you fit in" income distribution, and yet still having to juggle money more than I'm happy with. The obvious answer is "we're spending it all" but I wanted to get a better idea of how and on what. Unsurprisingly, the huge mortgage is the main culprit, but after that our biggest spending is on food, followed by travel (primarily train), general household stuff (including some recent purchases of new things), and power.

There aren't many obvious targets for big reductions in spending. We can save a bit by switching energy supplier as I've not done that in a while. I was going to say that this was frustrating but perhaps it's something to be pleased about, that I've already done all the easy stuff and we're not being obviously wasteful.

Almost all our food, travel and household spending (i.e. the top 3 after the mortgage) is done on the shared credit card, and although I set a nominal budget for that in Accountz, we've exceeded it most months this year. I haven't been doing any kind of enforcement on that budget and it's probably time to start. For now, I'm going to start making sure both Tony and I know each week where we are, and hopefully just being kept informed will be enough to bring us back into line. I really don't want to get into setting detailed targets if I can avoid it, especially not on food as I already have to think about food more than I want to.

The microwave in our kitchen was built in; we assume it was fitted at the time the house was built, nearly 20 years ago. About 2 years ago the timer dial went a bit wrong and started zeroing on 7 minutes rather than 0 minutes. We adapted and kept using it. About a month ago the turntable stopped turning, which was rather harder to cope with.

Unrelatedly, we had our annual gas safety check and the device that checks the oven is lit when the gas is flowing is beginning to fail (and spare parts are hard to obtain, naturally).

As we can't afford a whole new oven yet, and probably don't want to get one until we're ready to redo the kitchen (ahahaha), I decided to replace the microwave with a combi microwave, so we have an oven alternative at the point we no longer have a working safety device and the gas oven gets condemned.

It was only when I started to remove the built-in microwave that I discovered the power lead was plugged in at the back of the cupboard above, and the lead goes through a small hole in the back of the unit. Luckily I was able to unwire the plug and pull the cable out to get rid of the old and busted microwave. I temporarily rearranged the kitchen counters to fit the shiny replacement on for the first night, and then the next day Jonny took a small saw to the built-in unit and made a neat hole big enough to put a plug through. Then we could install the new hotness in the same space.

The new microwave is smaller and lighter and more power efficient and has reliable controls and a turntable that turns. It has auto-cook and auto-defrost programs for common food types and weights. Our lodger approved the defrost as being a great improvement over the old one. Sadly it lacks a potato button, but the instructions have recommendations for jacket spuds that I intend to try out this weekend.

(I now need to get the old microwave to Milton HWRC, if any Cambridge drivers are planning a tip run soon and would like to offer it a lift.)

10 days in France, staying with Tony's mother Louise, accompanied by:
my mother Ruth & stepfather Mick
my youngest brother Matt
my stepbrother Daniel and his daughter Sophie (for 7 of the 10 days)
my stepsister Rebecca (for 7 of the 10 days)

Jonny was supposed to come too but backed out at the last minute in hopes of a job interview.

Me, Tony, Charles & Sophie stayed in the house, everyone else was housed in two of Louise's gites. james_r stopped by for the last couple of days but had to camp on a spare bit of lawn (camping is not usually offered by Louise, but we'd run out of beds).

The weather was warm through to dangerously hot and back to warm again: we swam almost every day and ate outside together every evening. Charles and his step-cousin were adorable together, and Charles learned to cope with two excitable young dogs very well indeed (from abject terror on the first evening, to chasing them around by the time we left).

We got back yesterday evening and today we had a new lodger arrive (another Microsoft intern) and the gasman cameth to do the annual safety check (everything passed, but the oven is wearing out, as well as the boiler).

I am not as rested by the holiday as I'd hoped for: large-group holidays are a bit too stressful for me I think. Luckily I have the long weekend so I can potter around at home and be an antisocial hermit before going back to work next week.

Simon asked if I'd factored in power, which obviously I should have done. Our power meter has just broken (now I can find out if Maplin will honour the instructions on the back to return it to them for WEEE disposal) so I am forced to fall back on the manual and some rough calculation. I know I did measure the power consumption at one point but if I wrote down the numbers I don't know where.

The manual says it uses 505-550W, so for a 5-hour loaf that will be 2.75kWh. It uses little power on timer (this I do remember from when I had it on the meter) so if we round it up to 3kWh a loaf, that makes the sums easier and probably more than covers the on-timer usage.

The number of weeks of use in the last 18 months has been 72.5 (calculated as the number of weeks of not-paying the milkman £3 per week for bread - 18 months is actually 78 weeks and the difference is from when we've been away).

A guess at our typical usage is 3 loaves a week on weekdays (overnight) and a fourth over the weekend (daytime). Checking with our power supplier, Economy 7 units are approx 6.2p and daytime units are approx 17.1p

3 kWh x (3 x 6.2 + 17.1) = 61p per week on electricity.
72.5 weeks x 61p = £44.17.

The initial cost of the breadmaker was £90, and it's taken 72.5 weeks to clear that with the difference between the money we spend on bread ingredients and the money we used to spend on bread, which means a saving of about 124p a week. But factor in the power, and that becomes a mere 63p per week saved, and another 70 weeks or so (another 18 months) to really break even.

Still worth it.

Edit James supplies some data in the comments below from the same model of breadmaker, using 0.4kWh for a 5-hour bake (the one we usually do). Rounding up to 0.5kWh means I can divide the costs above by 6:
10p per week on electricity, reducing the weekly saving to 134p per week
£7.36 on electricity in the last 72.5 weeks, which takes 5.5 weeks to clear and therefore we will "really" have broken even by mid-September.

We broke even on the breadmaker last month, at which point we had spent £215.72 on the breadmaker and ingredients and saved up £217.50 by not paying the milkman £3 per week for bread.

It is still a source of daily pleasure.

I still love collecting data.

It's a nice summery morning and I've opened up both the patio doors into the garden. The old patio door was sliding, and you could only have half the window space open, and that off to one side of the room. The new doors open outward, making much wider open area, and it's central within the room. Having both doors open makes the living room feel like an extension of the garden, or vice versa.

I've put Charles's ball tent outside. He's got freedom to run in and out and I can supervise from the sofa.

Even if it's only for warm days in summer months, I love this. It's one of the little "lifestyle improvements" of the new doors and windows, above and beyond them simply being double-glazed.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed rust on the outside of the boiler. We're on British Gas Homecare, so a gasman was dispatched with pleasing promptness, and diagnosed a leaky heat exchanger inside the boiler. That part was also covered on Homecare, and replaced within a few days. However, the rusty case is cause for concern. At the moment, the boiler is ok. But if the case rusts through, and is no longer airtight, it has to be replaced. And the boiler is sufficiently old that apparently replacement cases aren't made any more, so we are looking at a new boiler.

The house is 19 years old, and I have no reason to be believe the boiler to be any younger, so I was planning a replacement in the next few years anyway. But this is a bit sooner than planned.

I did a brief bit of research into heat pumps, as mentioned in the wonderful Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air by Professor David MacKay of this parishcity. A heat pump is a reverse air conditioner and is much more efficient than a traditional boiler - 300%-500% efficient, i.e. it uses much less energy to run than it moves around as heat. It runs off electricity, not gas, so converting the heating of housing to heat pumps is a step along the "electrify everything and green the electricity supply" grand plan of How To Stop Emitting Carbon Dioxide, as outlined in MacKay's book. It should also cost less to run.

Unfortunately the heat pump market is still customised expensive solutions for people with large gardens and lots of money. Too much technical information about "choices" is still presented (ground-source or air-source? heat only or domestic water too? change your radiators or not?), and too much obscure information is requested by companies before they'll quote. Why no, I don't know the area of my house in square metres, or my garden for that matter. Why can't I just give the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, as I do for getting a home insurance quote? Why aren't there easy ways to estimate the space I'd need in the garden for a ground-source pump like "about the size of two garden sheds" or similar?

Philip Pullman is promoted as a "satisfied customer" by one of the companies I contacted. That's lovely, but I am not a bestselling novelist. What I want is the easy quote for the suburban family with a small garden, but no-one's doing that yet.

Here's my free tip for someone wanting to do well by doing good: found a company that will do mass-market heat pumps, persuade the govt to subsidise installation on carbon reduction grounds, and make contracts with the big energy companies to sell to their customers, in the same way insulation has been recently. If boilers need replacing after 15-20 years, that's a lot of British people each year in the same situation I am right now.

Putting heat pumps aside, I got British Gas to send a man round to quote me for a new boiler, which happened after work on Wednesday. The chap was pleasant and low-pressure, but the cost is significantly above Which? Local price guides for the same sort of work (about 33% more). Still about half the price of the best guess I got for a heat pump. I have contact details for a couple of local companies but even the Which? Local price would blow all our emergency reserves, and then where are we if something else breaks? We just spent most of our readily-available money on windows and a fence.

More sensibly, we can save up over the next year, plan to mitigate the possibility of boiler failure during the next winter, and get a range of quotes this time next year. That gives another year for the mass-market heat pump to arrive too. Come on invisible hand, get a move on.

Since the neighbours trimmed their leylandii, the sun is on the garden 2-3 hours earlier. This morning I replaced the hook for the extending clothes line in the new fence (the fence man lost it, Jonny found it yesterday), had both lines up and a load of sheets in feeble sunlight by 9am 10am.

By 11am the clouds had finally given way to proper sunshine, and I decided to tackle erecting the outdoor rotary airer. Digging the hole for the spike was quick, hammering it in took longer, and annoyingly the spike was most of the way in before I realised it was no longer perfectly vertical. On the principle that perfect is the enemy of good enough, I continued, and in another 20 minutes we had a working airer at a slightly jaunty angle with another washload hanging on it.

I ran out of pegs, so the last of the load went on one of the indoor airers transplanted to the patio. It should all be dry by now, or very soon. I love outdoor drying for clearing laundry backlogs like that.

The workmen finished on Friday with new front and back doors. We are all still getting used to the doors and their funky multipoint locking systems. On the whole they are much more secure but Charles found the biggest insecurity feature within 2 minutes: he can open the front door from the inside unless we explicitly key lock it. This then leads to amusing faff trying to reopen the door later, and remembering the right sequence of actions to do so.

I am delighted with the new windows and doors, both aesthetically and functionally. I need to clear some space on my camera so I can take some "after" photos to go with the "before" ones I took last week. We have a bit of tidying up to do on two of the windows, which had secondary glazing fitted: a bit of filler and paint required to make them nice. And two windows have been waiting for blinds for over a year, and our en suite blind badly needs replacing. Actually I am fed up with all the curtains in the house, which we inherited from the previous buy-to-let owner, but haven't yet found time to think about replacements or budgets for same.

The ladies from the houses either side were having a gossip in the driveway on Friday evening, so I wandered outside to say hello and allowed my arm to be twisted into showing them the patio and back doors, and the new fence. "Have you won the pools?" joked one. If only.

I renewed the house insurance last night. Comparethemarket are the only big comparison site to explicitly cope with the concept of lodgers. The best quote I found was £150 cheaper than last year, though sadly this doesn't seem to be related to the improved security of the windows and doors (I experimented to check this) so I can't claim it as a saving from installing them. Most likely the saving comes from insuring the expensive bike elsewhere and having another year without making a claim.

Yesterday the gasman cameth, and fixed our boiler for now.

Also yesterday the glaziers came, and replaced 5 windows. I think it will take them until Thursday to finish doing all the windows and the three doors. I spent some happy time playing with the new windows and admiring all the features, and most of all admiring that we had BIG WHOLE PANES rather than mock-Georgian little panes. It makes a surprising difference to the light in the room, not having those wooden dividers, and much nicer view outside too.

This week we have a new lodger arriving and the current one leaving, and assorted shopping arriving, including a groundspike for the rotary airer that ghoti and cjwatson gave us ages ago, so I will finally get that into use, so we can dry clothes without taking over the whole garden.

(Also expected this week: catfood, nappy soak because John Lewis stopped stocking it the week after I found they stocked it, washable potty-training pants, and some frivolous books.)

Dusting and putting the furniture back in our room after the window was fitted meant I did a nice declutter of old paper off my bedside shelves, and vacuumed the dust off the rolling boxes and suitcases stored under the bed.

I unearthed my old stereo which had such a thick layer of dust I vacuumed it too. I decided to try installing it in Charles's room: it was my pride and joy at age 18, but I haven't listened to it since Charles was born. He has figured out the on-off button and I have it tuned to Radio 2 for now. He danced to the music. Later I will teach him about playing CDs and supply him with ones I don't mind being broken.

The double-glazing deposit was cashed a bit over a fortnight ago, so I'm expecting fitting in the next 2-4 weeks.

Our side of the neighbour's leylandii has been cleaned up. The gardeners took away all their own mess plus the festering woodpile on the driveway that's been there since Jonny and I took down the elder threatening the house last summer. The same garden company came back on Thursday & Friday to rebuild the fence; at the moment it is in an amusing intermediate phase with the framework up but the fence panels themselves only 1/5 done. I assume they are coming back to finish on Monday ...

The boiler is in trouble. I spotted some nasty rust on the casing and called the British Gas homecare people who sent someone out to confirm that there's a problem with the heat exchanger, which he can fix with a part covered by our policy, but that the casing itself is safety-critical and so old they can't get the parts any more. So when it rusts through, we need a new boiler.

Now would be the time to find out if heat pumps, as mentioned in Professor MacKay's talk, are a realistic possibility for replacement. Once I've worked out where the money is coming from. I was hoping for another year or two before having to sort out the central heating.

For at least two years we've had a fence that needs mending after it got damaged in a storm (it's leaning at a tipsy angle). For at least a year, I've been meaning to go and talk to my neighbours whose leylandii are just the other side of the tipsy fence. At the least, I wanted to trim back the ever-encroaching branches on our side, but actually I wanted to ask them to reduce the height so the sun hits our washing lines before lunchtime. It didn't make sense to fix the fence and then do tree work, in case we dropped branches on the fence.

Of course I've just procastinated away the entire year, because I'm tired after work, or they're not in yet, and really because I've never spoken to them and opening an acquaintance with such a loaded subject as Your Trees And My Garden was frankly scary.

Out of the blue, on Monday they had the landscape gardeners in and the trees are now down to a reasonable height. The husband popped round to talk to me about the fence and left a message with Jonny. I returned the visit once I was back from ballet, and we had a very pleasant chat. I saw the lovely job the gardeners had done of trimming back the trees inside the garden, and got their number. The neighbours are planning to get them in annually from now on, to stop the trees getting out of control again.

They are not in a big hurry about the fence, but a bit concerned because their visiting daughter's dog nearly escaped under it last weekend. Charles is currently very scared of dogs, so this is more incentive than they may realise. I'm getting a quote later this morning from the same gardeners to trim back the trees on my side, and also a separate quote for the fence. It'll be a big relief to finally tick off those two jobs.

Most importantly, the neighbours are no longer faceless sources of anxiety, but nice people I can go and talk to if I need to.

Today's excitement has been visiting the Polarglaze showroom in Cottenham and coming to a mutually-acceptable agreement on double-glazing the house. We got them round to quote a few weeks ago and have been thinking over options and our budget (as well as getting another quote from another reputable local company). The discussion was really good, going into exactly what options we want for each window and door, and the showroom was small but well-laid out with lots of different options on view.

Charles was fairly manageable: all the doors meant he was in pure toddler heaven. Less fun was waiting in the icy cold afterwards for over 20 minutes before the "every 10 minutes" bus service turned up to take us home.

I'm so happy this is really happening. Getting the house double-glazed has been something I've wanted to do for ages and we're finally in a position to afford it. One of the windows we're replacing is in the junk room, so that gives me a real incentive to crack on with decluttering it enough to make access to the window easy. I have about 4-6 weeks ...

Just under a year ago we bought a breadmaker.

Because my accounting software allows it, I created a little bucket in our savings account and another little bucket in the food+drink spending account. I've been tracking spending on breadmaking supplies (flour, yeast, seeds, etc) and also putting aside £3 per week as that's what we were spending on bread from the milkman before the breadmaker arrived.

By the end of 2008 we had saved up £138.75 and spent £165.27 (including the cost of the breadmaker).

I may have missed some of the breadmaking supplies, as this relies on me inspecting receipts before I enter the totals into accounting software, and some things are used both for general cooking and for bread (e.g. butter, pesto). On the other hand I haven't adjusted the saving on not-buying-loaves even though bread prices have risen in the shops. Even with those uncertainties, it's clear we should expect to break even sometime this year.

Money aside, it's been a big improvement to general happiness in the house. The bread is yummy, makes the house smell lovely, and we've had lots of fun trying out different recipes. We did intermittently make bread by hand before getting it, but that petered out whenever we got busy. We've done other, more expensive, things to make life happier in the last couple of years (e.g. buying a dishwasher, hiring a cleaner) but those have been more about removing hassle, whereas the breadmaker has added a little pleasure to every day.

Charles and I have been well since Thursday afternoon. (This 48-hour thing is very sensible - Charles twice went 36 hours between bouts before finally getting well.) Tony managed to avoid being ill altogether. Jonny succumbed Friday but I think is better now.

On Saturday we spent the afternoon with arnhem and L, and I was introduced to the Ukulele Orchestra DVD while Tony spent quality time with L's lego. I was meant to go out for a meal celebrating my friend's escape from ex-work but by the time I needed to leave I was far too tired so wimped out.

On Sunday we made an excellently productive shopping trip into town, for the three Finch birthdays this month and a few other errands. Sunday shopping in Cambridge is almost bearable although we did seem to keep orbiting John Lewis and the not-quite-finished Grand Arcade. Yippee on King Street is fairly child-friendly and Charles approves of noodles.

I am still falling asleep around 8-9pm most evenings (today being an obvious exception), but now mostly avoiding the midnight insomnia. I will assume I just need to sleep a lot, and try not to resent losing evenings with Tony.

Charles greeted James's return from Australia with terrified screams and a tantrum demonstration.

Our cleaner is lovely but just as we are settling into a good routine she is going to miss 4 weeks due to Easter hols and a trip home to her mother. I will try to encourage myself and the other adult residents not to let the place slip back into squalor in the meantime.

There's this idea being promoted that washing at 30°C rather than 40°C will help reduce power consumption. I am dubious about whether things will be cleaned well enough, especially given the advice "It is however recommended that towels, underwear, sportswear, baby clothes, all bedding, and heavily stained items still be washed at higher temperatures to ensure they get completely clean."

Currently I'm working my way through the draft of Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air, a book on sustainable energy by Professor David MacKay of the Department of Physics in Cambridge. It is an excellent facts-and-numbers-driven analysis. His debunking of the mobile-phone charger myth inspired me to do some calculation on "washing at 30".

The manual for our washing machine states that it uses 59 litres of water for a standard wash, and 0.5kWh of electricity. It is plumbed into both hot and cold mains, and for wash temperatures up to ~65°C it uses the house hot water rather than doing any heating itself. As a household, we do a nappy and a non-nappy wash most days of the week, nappies at 60°C and everything else at 40°C.

Non-nappy washes
For the sake of easy calculation, I'll call it 6 washes a week currently at 40°C, and 60 litres of water per wash. The specific heat capacity of water is 4.2 kJ/kg/K and water is handily 1kg/l.

60 kg x 4.2 kJ/kg/°K x 10°K = 2.52MJ per wash, so 15.12MJ per week.

Our water is heated by gas and we are billed for gas in kWh. 1kWh = 1000 J/s x 3600s = 3.6MJ.

15.12/3.6 = 4.2kWh per week. We are currently charged 2.574p/kWh inc VAT, so the saving would be a grand total of 11p per week, or £5.72 per year.

Either there is something wrong with my calculation or this is a fairly minimal effect on energy consumption.


Nappy washes
We wash the nappies at 60°C but strictly speaking, only the soiled nappies need to go at 60, the rest could go at 40 with the non-nappy washes. Without worrying too much about implementation, we could cut from 6 x 60°C washes per week to 3 x 60°C washes, and 2 x 40°C washes (we could probably eliminate one wash a week by mixing the wet-only nappies with other laundry).

Pleasingly, 3 x 60 x 4.2 x 20 is the same as 6 x 60 x 4.2 x 10, so we know that part of the answer already. What about saving 1 washload a week? If we assume the water is heated from mains cold at 10°C to 40°C then we have 1 x 60 x 4.2 x 30, which is half the previous answer. Plus we save the 0.5kWh of electricity which costs just under 11p/kWh.

So in total, we could save 22p per week by separating out the soiled nappies, and we could only do this by continuing to wash at 40 most of the time, so it's not additional to the 11p per week above.


Showers
Showers are also usually taken at about 40°C. Some quick experimentation with a measuring jug and the shower tells me that our shower flows at about 8 litres per minute. So if we shower for 7.5 minutes that's the same as one non-nappy washload. My guesstimate from our morning routine is that I spend 5-10 minutes in the shower and Tony spends 10-15 minutes. Plus Jason and Jonny take showers every day in the other bathroom, but I don't observe for how long. Our showers are both fed from the hot water tank and do no additional heating of their own.

If we assume an average of 10 minutes per adult per shower per day, that's 280 minutes of showers a week, equivalent to 37 washes at 40. The energy used by heating water for a wash at 60 is 5/3 that for a wash at 40 (heating from 10 to 60 rather than 10 to 40), so our current laundry is equivalent to 6 x 8/3 = 16 washes at 40 (16x5.5p=88p/week), less than half of the cost of showering. Without the nappy washes, it would be less than one-sixth (6x5.5p=33p/week).

Baby costs
Jonny asked just now "so how much does Charles cost then?" to which the answer is 6 nappy washes and 1 non-nappy wash per week.
Water heating is (6x5/3 + 1) x 5.5p = 60.5p/week.
Running the washing machine is 7 x 0.5kWh x 11p/kWh = 38.5p/week.
A total of 99p/week on baby laundry energy costs. Detergent costs are left as an exercise for the reader.

I have finally employed a cleaner. After doing a bit of budgeting and failing to do anything serious about finding someone, an acquaintance serendipitously emailed about her cleaner wanting more hours. We met up and had a satisfactory interview, and she is now coming once a week for 3 hours. The first week she needed all of that just to tackle our rather grim bathroom and ensuite; the second week she re-did those rooms and managed to get on to the downstairs loo, kitchen, and some dusting/vacuuming. I am pleased with the results and the house is rather more pleasant to be in. The cleaner is Chinese with halting but reasonable English. The only practical difference this has made so far has been occasional vocabulary gaps about cleaning equipment, solved with much gesticulation.

(Why oh why though, does part of my brain feel that paying someone to keep the house clean is some kind of failure on my part? I'm mostly not listening to it, and remind myself there are actually 4 adults in the house to do the housework. And since when did my self-esteem get based on my housework anyway?)

About three weeks back, Tony spent a few hours properly fitting child locks to all the kitchen cupboards, and securing certain doors now that Charles has figured out door handles. The utility room was the real challenge - we wanted to be able to leave a gap big enough for the cats to get through but small enough to keep Charles out, and eventually we hit upon using a large hook to keep it hooked ajar. We've done something similar with the kitchen, though the gap there is smaller, just enough for an adult inside the room to let themselves out. Together with a little hook on the airing cupboard door, we have removed swathes of potential adult-child conflict and reduced stress levels considerably.

Also the changes I made about a month ago (toyboxes for Charles, upgraded airer capacity) have likewise had a good effect on the household. Laundry logjams seem to be far less frequent, and I can clear up the living room to "company ready" in only a few minutes.

Going back even further, we have had the breadmaker for a little over 6 weeks now and that has turned into a real source of comfort and happiness. My accounting so far suggests we are spending only slightly less on bread-ingredients than we were on getting bread delivered, but we're eating a much wider variety of loaves of better quality and freshness. (Occasionally I have to remember to eat something other than bread.) I've noticed some indirect savings too, as I spend much less on food at work when I have nice bread from home to keep me going.

This weekend I have been trying to tackle two household issues: somewhere to store Charles's toys and books to make tidying easier; the constant pressure on drying space on the landing.

We line-dry outside where possible, though in winter that's hard. I've had a washload hung out on each of Saturday and Sunday for the majority of the daylight hours, and they came in much less wet, but not actually dry. It did at least reduce pressure on the drying space indoors and allow us to catch up a bit. In the long term, when we have the garden a bit more sorted, I am going to get a rotary dryer and put it in the odd little corner behind the house where people don't tend to go - so we can continue to dry outside easily in the summer even when wanting to use the garden for parties or just eating outside.

Inside, we have a miscellaneous collection of folding airers, some much more efficient than others. Everything takes noticeably longer to dry in winter. There are four airers apparently permanently in use on the landing and I have ordered replacements for all four, all of them taller and with more drying space than anything we already have, without taking up any more floor area. I also chose some bog-standard radiator racks for the bathrooms, and some rather fancy radiator racks that unfold to hold quite a lot of laundry - these are intended for the two lodger rooms, and I hope will give Jason and Jonny a bit more flexibility.

I have also ordered a number of Really Useful Boxes in which to store Charles's toys and books, picking out sizes that should fit well on the existing corner unit shelves we are using. They worked well at first but now there is so much stuff that it all just forms an amorphous heap in which it is hard to find anything, and which Charles will pull all over the floor given half a chance. I'm planning to use the boxes to store similar stuff together, so hopefully we'll have less "pull everything on the floor" and in any case it'll be easier to quickly tidy up and actually have it look tidy rather than a heap on a shelf. fanf is quite excited because one of the sizes I've ordered may work well on the ordinary IVAR shelves as well; I ordered two extra just to see.

Finally I spent far too long wrangling train times and ticket prices, but have now got reserved seats and tickets to visit Tony's sister in March. The Family Railcard is very useful here. Charles is getting big and boisterous enough that it is an advantage to have a seat reserved for him by buying him a ticket, as well as saving the money by using the railcard.

I used to be a long-standing customer of TheTrainLine.com but they have really started gouging for credit card charges and postage charges. East Midlands Trains sell tickets "powered by TheTrainLine" but without the gouging. A useful discovery, although I had to register before I could confirm it for sure.

Small single room, fully furnished, in large friendly shared house. Other occupants are 3 young professionals, 2 cats and a baby. Freeview and broadband internet. Suit writing-up student or weekly commuter. £300 per month, inclusive of all bills.

We spent most of the weekend working on the Great Furniture Shuffle that will result in: a new joint study for me and Tony, a bedroom for Charles, and a lettable small bedroom. The new study is really taking shape, though the last pieces (2 small desks) will not arrive from IKEA until 21st November. We were both getting quite pleased and excited about it by the end of Sunday. It will be really good to be able to do our respective at-computer stuff in the same room rather than opposite sides of the house, and to have baby-safe space near our computers so there's a chance of getting a bit more done without neglecting Charles, or having to constantly redirect him from the stuff he shouldn't get into.

My current study is a junk room at the moment, and for the medium term that's what it's going to stay - somewhere I can put things that need sorting out where they aren't in the way. I'm going to move the stuff I need to use regularly into the new study and deal with the rest a bit at a time when I have spare oomph. To stop it being a junk room FOREVER, I have a long-term plan to make it a music room and install an upright piano. Maybe in a couple of years.

Keith's coming round tomorrow with his drill to help me fix shelves to walls, another line to cross off the to-do list. We're about 1/3 through the list I wrote on Sunday.

Conrad (Tony's father) arrived on Thursday evening and we had a pub meal but flaked out early. Douglas moved out on Friday, just in time for us to turn the room around for Lucy to stay in over the weekend. Today has been very lazy, with a venture out to the local recreation ground for Charles to play on everything. His favourite thing by far is the zip slide: we very carefully let him ride on it with both me and Lucy there to catch him, and he was very reluctantly detached, and then spent the next 5 minutes walking back and forth following the zip slide as other children played on it.

Tomorrow Sarah & Paul are visiting for the day. The plan is to have a family barbecue (try not to roast the baby).

Found in the spare room and disavowed by Keith, Cat & Andrew:

* 1 pair yellow cotton women's trousers, size 12, Cinzano label
* 1 pair black cotton women's trousers, size 18 (but a very small 18 in my opinion). DenimCo label.
* 1 "Salvador Dalek" tshirt, size L

If I can't find their owners, they'll probably end up with a charity shop (except the tshirt, we'll probably keep that as it's very cool).

This week my spare energy has been mostly devoted to the house. On Monday and Tuesday Keith emptied his room downstairs. On Wednesday afternoon, while Charles napped, I managed to move the futon which has been a sofa in Tony's room for the last 3 years downstairs and turn it into a double bed. On my own. Go me, ug me strong woman, etc. Keith restored the light fitting which has been gone for over 5 years so it actually looks like a normal room, and also brought in the bedframes for the spare room and stashed them temporarily in the downstairs room.

Later that evening, Tony helped me take down the high metal bed in our spare room, and together we sorted through the large piles of bedding, towels etc that had lurked a) on the futon b) in the airing cupboard.

On Thursday afternoon I had a serious go at the spare room, taking everything off one set of shelves, moving the shelves to their new location in the room, and putting everything back on them. All the while Charles was bimbling around the floor fairly happily and occasionally finding unsuitable things to eat, and submitting unhappily to their removal. Then I took down the next set of shelves, and with Douglas's help got them across into Tony's room without completely destroying them. Then I did more things-shuffling, and vacuumed both rooms, this time with Charles in the Mei Tai on my back.

On Friday I did the bedframes in the spare room. These are 2 single beds, one at roughly normal height, with the other rolled underneath, so that you can roll it out as an extra bed. There isn't room for this in the spare room, but it's a handy way of storing a spare single bed for when we want it later. So I brought up the lower frame, plonked the mattress down, and then assembled the higher bed above it. And then had to take the higher bed apart again because I'd forgotten about the wooden slats that hold the mattress and put the frame in upside down. So then I did it all over again. Charles kept getting annoyed because he wanted to play in the area at the end of the bed and I was repeatedly in his way screwing the bed together.

Anyway, our regular guests, including louise_e_finch and ruthcoleman, will no doubt be very glad to know that we have a normal single guest bed for them from now on!

Hopefully someone from freecycle will come and take away the disassembled high metal bed later today. I need to confirm with Keith what's happening with the remaining mattress and bed frame for which we have no room, but with any luck will also go to freecycle. On Wednesday we have stuff coming from IKEA's online service which should mean we start on the planned reorganisation of the living room and finish reorganising the spare room. Also on the to-do list is:

* tidy up the bookcases in our room, and re-space the shelves so we can get 10 shelves floor-to-ceiling rather than the current 9
* declutter the study
* turn Tony's room into Charles's room

Those last 2 tasks unpack into huge to-do lists of their own but I'm not going there just yet. Originally I planned for Charles to have his own room by the time he was 1. That's not going to happen, but we might manage it by the time he's 2.

Today I finally put up curtains that actually cover the entire window in the downstairs bedroom, so that Douglas could move his stuff into it, so that Jason (our new long-term lodger) can move into the upstairs room. The curtains, like all the ones in the house, are rather blah, but "new curtains" is rather a long way down the priority list. I think that all that remains for the downstairs bedroom is net curtains and a desk, before I can tick that room off as completely done.

Last Wednesday I made a little list:

Still need to: work out what IVAR we need, browse IKEA catalogue for other items, order mattress, order dishwasher, import accounts into Accountz and work out how much money we have, agree the remaining DIY with Keith.

That evening I ordered the mattress. On Thursday morning I was telephoned by the company to take payment and arrange delivery, on Friday afternoon it arrived, and on Friday night we slept on it. I keep being surprised and delighted with how comfortable it is.

I worked out which dishwasher I wanted, but it was incredibly hard to order online, so I didn't. On Friday, I rang a local company, Andrew McCulloch, on the recommendation of a colleague. They were very apologetic that it might take as much as 2 weeks to get it in stock and deliver it. They're also sending someone round today to check that the necessary bits for connection are present in the kitchen, so that delivery and installation will be straightforward. Also on Friday, the dining table and chairs arrived on Friday from Emmaus.

On Saturday I picked up a van from Enterprise (Practical being all out of vans for the whole weekend) and had an adventure of a day with the help of jdc39. We picked up the 2 second-hand sofas from Nadia & Adam, spent a brief time cooing over their tiny baby, then survived not one but two IKEAs (Wembley and Edmonton - a vaguely sane route home from Beaconsfield) and returned home with a good haul of useful stuff. The van was just too short to fit in enough IVAR as well as the sofas, but I've now discovered I can order the rest online, and delivery will cost less than another van hire.

We got home and I went to a party at crazyscot's and stayed up too late.

On Sunday Keith came over, loaded his stuff onto the Giant Trolley, and helped me unload the rest of the van. Then I did a tip run with the old dodgy mattress and some things belonging to lnr, who was then very helpful as I got a set of matching crockery from Tesco, and swapped an oldish freecycled Dyson for my own Dyson that's lived with my exhousemates for 4 years.

Then a break for late Sunday lunch at the Carlton with james_r and Hanna (and Tony and Charles!) James talked me into doing another tip run to remove some of the junk from his yard (3 rusty bikes, a broken tv and a broken cooker were among the haul). The staff at the tip were very helpful (on both occasions, actually). Soon after I got back, I showed around a potential long-term lodger, and then after a rest I went to help our new short-term lodger move in.

After a cuddle with Charles and dinner with Tony, I did some more fiddling with the accounting software until I was too tired to read the screen. The van went back this morning and I cycled from Histon to work - about 3-4 times as far as I normally cycle to work, so I was a bit hotter!

What's next? Finish getting Accountz set up and work out how much money we have; make the internet order with IKEA; sort out my new credit card; cull the rest of the crockery and agree with Keith what he's having and what's being freecycled; fit the cupboard locks to stop Charles opening them.

I'm on Ubuntu at home now and it's been surprisingly painless. It's not perfect of course, but it mostly Just Works well enough for me and I can open all my old letters and spreadsheets, including the vital tax one. I've bought a copy of Personal Accountz as suggested by james_r and it installed very easily. I have QIF exports of my old Microsoft Money courtesy of hilarityallen but I haven't yet tried to import them because reading user manuals while fending off marauding baby is not recommended.

I was ill last Friday and Saturday with whatever had laid low Tony and Charles the previous days. By Saturday night I was well enough for an evening at the Gallery with lovely stew and spong and people being amazingly patient with Charles's newfound mobility and unstoppable determination to divide the world into things edible and bashable.

Keith and Cat have been moving out. Keith has decided to avoid using a van and instead bought a giant trolley thing - it's 1m x 2m, takes 1 metric tonne and he moved the pinball table, the sofa, at least one bed, and many many boxes on it. Not all at once, that would be silly. Cat has ferried some items by car. We went to Sunday lunch at the pub and returned a few hours later to find the sofa and the dining table had gone. The armchairs have been left until I retrieve the sofas we're getting from Nadia and Adam. The living room feels really roomy at the moment, even with the regular baby-related mess, and I'd like to try to keep some of that roomy feel when we refill it with furniture.

Today I've been quite productive. james_r took me to Emmaus and I found a reasonable replacement dining table and chairs, to be delivered on Friday. I got in touch with Adam to arrange collecting the sofas this weekend and I've requested a van booking from Practical. And I finally advertised the rooms in the house on ucam.adverts.accommodation.

Still need to: work out what IVAR we need, browse IKEA catalogue for other items, order mattress, order dishwasher, import accounts into Accountz and work out how much money we have, agree the remaining DIY with Keith. And a lot more besides, but that will do for now.

I've agreed with myself that I will not feel guilty about not volunteering for anything or taking on anything new: job, home and baby is only just manageable right now. Not until Charles has a bedroom of his own and the study is emptied of junk. If I'm together enough to get those things done, I've enough capacity to take on something else, but not until.

Keith & Cat have given their notice to move out, so we're looking for lodgers to replace them. If you know someone who might be interested in one (or both!) rooms, please point them at my contact details. Room details are:

2 furnished double rooms in large shared house with garden. Very pleasant location in north Cambridge, between Huntingdon Road and Histon Road. Shops and bus routes 5,6,7 all a few minutes walk away. Broadband internet. Permanent occupants are a couple with young baby and 2 cats. Each room is 400 pounds per month including all bills except telephone. Available from mid-July.

The house is now entirely Finch-owned (modulo huge sum of money owed to bank). The process started with a letter sent on the 4th January this year, and is now finally over. We're hugely pleased with and grateful to our Independent Financial Advisor, Nick Torrens, and our conveyancer, Mark Massucco. We're rather less pleased with our bank, Intelligent Finance, and their ability to come up with new and interesting ways to hold up a perfectly straightforward process.

Completion was today. Slightly worryingly, my online banking at IF shows me having 2 mortgages at the moment, but I assume it will sort itself out overnight.

Also on Wednesday Keith dropped a minor bombshell: over Christmas he and Cat decided they want to buy somewhere together during 2007. So he wants his equity and either Tony & I buy him out or we sell the house. Other options probably exist but they get very Complicated. So I started working out what needs to be done.
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Apart from signing and posting the letter to our bankers I can't do anything else until Monday. I wasn't really wanting to do this, but given it's going to happen, it's in my interest to do it as fast as possible, as the house is likely to increase in value faster than we can reduce the mortgage or build up savings. If it's just affordable now, it'll be less so by the end of the year. I'm somewhat stressed about the prospect of being suddenly even less well-off than expected, as well as managing life with a new baby, but currently I'm channelling most of that into making the process go as smoothly and cost-effectively as possible.

Ironically, on Thursday Tony & I finally signed our wills, which contain some carefully worked out provisions for my half of the house. If this all goes to plan we'll need to change those clauses completely to something rather more standard.

On Thursday night Sue and I decided to do a Christmas dinner yesterday, as she'll be spending Christmas Day in Heathrow airport.  We cheated hugely - she bought a pre-stuffed turkey joint from Iceland and I got ready-to-roast potatoes and precooked Yorkshire puddings from the Co-op.  I did at least chop and cook all the vegetables myself.  Nick C came up from London to catch up with her a bit, and crashed with us overnight.  I originally aimed for dinner on the table at 2pm but didn't get the turkey in early enough; I then rescheduled for 2:30 and had fun working out what needed to be cooked when, and it all went swimmingly apart from the potatoes failing to cook properly.  So we ended up eating it sometime after 3pm.  We were saved from hungry grumpiness by smoked salmon and bread nibbles served while dinner was cooking (a cunning trick I have learned from Tony's family), and in general the atmosphere was so relaxed that I refused to get bothered by producing dinner late.

After stuffing ourselves royally we sat and chattered until our bellies could cope with dessert and then returned to the table for mince pies with custard and/or cream, and the cheese and pate platter.  After that we watched Bill Bailey: Part Troll (after which Sue went to bed) and The Transporter (after which the rest of us talked for a while and then went to bed).  We had Christmas lights on the tree and on the bookcases, and lit candles.  In total 3 bottles of red wine were consumed by the four of us during the afternoon and evening, and a small amount of port.  It was a lovely day.

This morning Sue finished packing and was collected by a taxi at 1pm.  Tony went with her to the bus to help her load her baggage on board.  I'm going to miss her hugely, and it's unlikely she'll live with us again even if she returns to the UK.   She's been great company and so often helpful with Charles.  The house will not be the same without her.

This afternoon I have listened to 9 Lessons and Carols from King's and hung up all the Christmas cards.  There are presents under the tree (most of them for Charles) and we have everything we need for tomorrow.  Keith is filling the roof with new insulation before departing for his parents' house and Cat has already gone.  Just the three of us having our first Christmas together.

We're going to have a room available from the start of January, and I thought I'd try the informal friends-of-friends network before advertising more widely (though I'm aware that the pool of people willing to share with cats or babies is limited, and both at once even more so). Details are:

1 double room, shared house in nice location in north Cambridge. Shared bathroom, kitchen, living room, garden. Shops and bus routes 5,6,7 all within easy reach. Other occupants are 2 cats, 2 couples and a baby. 400 ukp pcm including all bills except telephone.

If you know anyone who might be interested, please point them at my contact details.

Felt less ill this morning, but tired enough to take another day's sick leave and get properly better this time. Alternately reading, listening to the radio, and faffing online passed the day quite pleasantly. By mid-afternoon I was feeling well enough to tackle some of the paperwork pile lurking around my desk. God knows what crack the gas suppliers use to come up with their formula for 'estimated use', but they'd overestimated us by 300 units - and that's after it's taken me over a month to get round to checking the reading. Still, their automated meter-reading line works well. I also had a pleasant customer service experience with Nationwide, requesting a replacement credit card as my signature has nearly rubbed off the existing one.

Given I was feeling better, fanf booked us tickets to see The Bourne Supremacy at Coneworld[1] for an early evening showing. My first visit there and the seats are agreeably comfy with sufficient leg room. The film itself was really very good, nicely following up the first one, with extra car-chase goodness. The visual style was even more edgy: short, fast, close-up, often moving too fast to see clearly but conveying a feeling very well, and the plot nicely executed. I would happily watch The Bourne Identity again, despite seeing it very recently, and I think Supremacy will make it onto my (very limited) DVD buy list when it's released.

The fly in the ointment for me was the botoxed forehead of Joan Allen (Pamela Landy), which kept distracting me every time she was on screen - a great expressionless expanse of forehead that made me want to scream in annoyance at the stupid things women do for 'beauty'.

[1] Not a typo, or rather based on a friend's typo the other week that we decided to keep.