November 2015 Archives – Mummascribbles

We became homeowners back in Aprl 2014 at the ripe old age of 31. It was a dream come true, something we thought was genuinely never going to happen. Growing up in London was always wonderful – that was until it came to moving out of the parental home.

Like many others, for a long time we were affected by the shortage of housing combined with the need to save ever-higher deposits and we soon discovered that it’s incredibly difficult for people to put down roots for the first time in their own home. An international survey found that UK first-time buyers are feeling even more downbeat than their European counterparts. In the UK, 89% of people surveyed said it is increasingly difficult to buy a home compared to 79% in Europe as a whole. For many, the first home has always been one of compromise, one that ticks just enough boxes to allow them on the ladder and now there are even more concessions to be made. We were definitely in a position where we couldn’t be hugely picky when we were looking for our house. We went to see a lot and were outbid on all but one which is the one we find ourselves living in now.

So if you’re searching for your first home and you’re finding things hard because of your budget, what can you do to be happier with your lot?

Know what you are buying

In some areas, houses are so scarce and buyers so keen to bag a home that they are making offers based on very quick viewings or worse still, no viewings at all. Consumer champions Which, recently released a warning urging potential home buyers to pay more attention to house maintenance issues that could add thousands to the cost of their home. Paying close attention to jobs that may need to be carried out to make your home liveable could help you haggle for a lower price and ensure you have spare funds to have the maintenance completed. It’s also pretty important to know what the house is made out of. We put an offer on a house that we soon discovered we couldn’t actually get a mortgage on because of the material that was used to build it. It can be incredibly hard in this competitive battle to get the offer in and accepted or to outbid others but make sure you know what you are bidding on to save not only your time but potential disappointment.

Be careful where you buy

Living in a desirable area with good local schools and transport links is what pushes up the price of a property, so are there any points you can compromise on? If you dream of a seaside home, does it need to be in the hippest area? Newbiggin by the Sea on the North East coast is officially the cheapest seaside spot in Britain with houses costing as little as £75,063. Also in the North, Middlesbrough has been named the cheapest town to buy a house in. While your job may dictate the areas where you’d like to live, your house criterion and budget will narrow your field further – enter your details into the BBCs calculator to find out where you can afford to live in the UK. We were really very limited to where we could live because of work and the fact that I need to be able to drive Zach to and from my mum’s three days a week. If you don’t have those limitations and can make that money stretch further by choosing a slightly different area, it’s definitely worth looking into what you can get and where.

Financial help

The government have announced a number of first buyer help schemes in recent years. Helptobuy is perhaps the most well known, it now allows you to buy new and existing homes with the help of an equity loan and mortgage guarantee. For council tenants with over 5 years residency in the same home, there’s the possibility of buying the property with a significant discount through Righttobuy. There are also various shared ownership schemes run by housing associations throughout the UK. These allow you to part-own your home, building equity instead of paying rent. Finally, to help savers, the government is also setting up special ISA’s for first time buyers, due to be launched this December. For every £200 savers put in, they’ll receive a £50 top up, to be put towards their purchase to a maximum of £3,000. If you’re buying as a couple, you can both open a home buyer ISA. Plus, if you’ve owned a home before but your partner hasn’t they will still be eligible for assistance, so you can still take advantage!

There are so many options out there now for first time buyers, and you know what, we got that help so it is absolutely possible to go through this means. We used the government Helptobuy scheme to buy our house and are forever thankful for this coming into place. We needed a 5% deposit (which was still thousands of pounds) but it made it so much more manageable to get to than a full on 20%. We would absolutely still be renting right now if we hadn’t had help.

Make your home your own

In reality, to get on the property ladder you may need to purchase a property that’s more of a doer-upper than you’d like. It may be that you have to budget for a new kitchen or don’t have as many rooms as you’d like. If you’re dealing with the latter, consider how you can best use the space that you have. You can separate rooms with bi-fold doors to allow free flow of light, take a look at the Vufold collection for some inspiration. This might mean being a little more creative with the areas you are left with but it should be a lot cheaper than adding additional rooms. Owing to the fact that we had no spare cash other than what we were using to actually buy the house, we had to make sure we bought somewhere that didn’t need major renovations. That said, the garden was a massive task in itself – the one thing that had been completely ignored by the previous owner!

From this…

…To this

If you’re not already a DIY enthusiast, as a first time buyer you may soon find yourself glued to YouTube finding out how you go about jobs like tiling and wallpapering. If this sounds like you, you may also want to check out your local college to see if they run any relevant DIY courses or book onto some of B&Qs handy courses for handyman wannabes. If there is one thing I have loved since we have moved in, it’s seeing the other half’s DIY skills growing. That and he now has enough tools to make goood use of the shed!

I feel incredibly lucky that the opportunity came our way to own our own home. We may have Mum’s old (very comfy) sofas, we may have the same wardrobe that we had in our old flat and we may have mismatched furniture throughout the house, but, what we also have is a wonderful little house that Zach knows is home. Somewhere he will grow up and go to school (we have the school playground at the bottom of the garden!), make friends and be happy.

Are you saving for your first home? Do you have any tips for those who are yet to climb onto the property ladder? How did you manage to save and are you a DIY god/goddess?

This is a collaborative post.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these – not because Zach has suddenly not been funny but because actually it is sometimes impossible to note everything down because he does not stop talking. I spent the Friday just gone at home with him and he gave me some massive corkers that I was able to quickly add to the notes on my phone, So here we go, here are a few things that Zach has recently said!

I was looking at him in the car and he looked so delicious:

Me: Can I eat you?

Zach: No you can’t

Me: Why?

Zach: Because I’m Zachary and I’m not food. This is food (patting the cake from nursery that he was munching on), but you can’t eat it because it’s my food.

When I lauged he said, It’s not funny is it?

Zach: I want some water

Me: I can do that for you

Zach: You little princess

The following happened after he threw some weetabix on the floor (something we are currently having to deal with a lot!).

Me: What did you do that for?

Zach: Because it’s really pooey and I want you to say naughty Zachary.

Whilst pointing at the tv the other day he said:

She’s got boobies. Have you got boobies? Ladies have boobies. I don’t have boobies, I have nipples.

Whilst with Daddy the other day he said:

Daddy you’re naughty and I’m going to throw you in the bin.

When I asked him what he wanted on his toast the other day he said:

I want mummy for toast. I’m going to butter you and I’m going to jam you. Butter, butter, butter, jam, jam, jam you.

There was a heartmelting moment when he said to me:

You’re a beautiful lady and I love you. Big kisses and cuddles.

After moaning at his daddy to move out the way and being asked why, he said:

Because I love daddy but I don’t want to sit with him. I just want to sit on my own. 

And finally, the corker. The first of its kind and we are not sure which one of us is to blame. But tonight, as we were getting him ready for bed, with all seriousness and in the absolutely correct context, he said:

Oh shit!!!!!

I truly hopes he forgets this one in the morning!

So there we have it, the latest batch of the funny little things he has said. He makes me laugh all the ruddy time with the stuff he comes out with.

It’s that time of year again. Autumn. Still very mild for mid November but full of fallen leaves and rain. I don’t know about you but there is something quite satisfying about kicking my way through the piles of leaves. I introduced this little pleasure to Zach just last week and he thoroughly enjoyed it too! The pavements are beautiful at the moment, and our garden which has the hugest trees at the end of it, is absolutely full of the deepest reds and ambers. Such a stunning time of year.

Of course along with the beauty comes the mud and puddles and with Zach being a relatively new fan of Peppa Pig, I am envisaging lots of requests coming up for jumping in those muddy puddles!

And so, it is the time of year to be thinking about buying wellies. With Zach’s feet growing as fast as they do, it’s almost guaranteed that we have to buy a new pair every year. He currently has a pair of size 7’s but I know that his feet are now at least a size 8 and so it is time to get him a new pair. I was recently introduced to the website Shoetique who have a selection of gorgeous footwear for the whole family. I popped onto their site to have a little look at their selection and fell instantly in love with their kids selection!

Source: Shoetique

They of course have a girls selection too and I’d have real trouble deciding between these two if I had a girl!

Source: Shoetique

And then of course there is me. I have a pair of wellies that, well, they have a hole in. Several holes. And so are pretty much useless to use in the rain! Being a huge fan of Joules myself, I would have even more trouble choosing between these. I do love stripes but how cute are those robins?

Source: Shoetique

Wellies are the one piece of footwear that you can really go all out on. It doesn’t matter how bright or colourful they are and so it’s always fun buying them. And there is something seriously cute about them running around in them. He always looks super adorable.

This post was written in collaboration with Shoetique.

You know when you think about doing something that you wouldn’t normally do and it turns out you’re a bit crap at it?! Well, we recently discovered we are really pants at growing things.  Keeping things alive. I mean, we’ve done a pretty good job with Zach so far, he’s here, growing big and strong and intelligent. So we’ve done pretty well at growing and nurturing a child. But give us some seeds and water and we fail. Miserably.

It all started a few weeks back. Zach and I were in the garden and I mentioned how the weeds had grown  (oh we are pretty good at growing weeds!), and suddenly Zach was fascinated with the thought that these were growing. Only to him, the growing process is supposed to be visible. So he got me to sit on the floor with him to watch one specific weed grow. It was cold on the paving but he wouldn’t let me get up. I explained to him that even though weeds were constantly growing, we couldn’t see it actually happening. He wasn’t happy and wouldnt accept it so we remained in place. After about 20 minutes he finally got bored (hoorah), gave up and we went inside. He didn’t forget though and for days he kept asking about that ruddy weed, staring out the back door to see if it had grown and disappointed that it hadn’t. Then I had a brainwave.

Cress.

Cress grows really fast. That’ll keep him happy I thought. So the next weekend we took a trip to Homebase and bought some Cress and Basil seeds along with some planting pots and set to work when we got home.  Reading the instructions we discovered that the best way to grow the Cress was on some damp kitchen towel and the Basil could go in soil.

What we didn’t realise was that we’d popped the top bit of tissue on too hard and so when we checked them the following day some of the seeds had stuck to it and were useless. We tried to move them to a separate pot to nurture them but they just didn’t grow.

That said, the ones that were OK were growing within a day and that’s all that really mattered.  And so we kept watering them and they kept on growing. Zach had forgotten about the weeds and was focused on watching the Cress grow (the basil is a slower process). He helped to water them every day and he was happy to see them changing. Or so I thought! 

It was at the point of the photo directly above that Zach changed his tune. There we were, all proud that we had provided him with what he wanted, to watch something grow, but one evening after nursery (he was very tired), I suggested watering them and he had a full on meltdown because guess what – he didn’t want them to grow anymore!  

Nooooooo, he wailed.  I don’t want them to grow mummy.

This happened a couple more times and it seemed he was well and truly over the need to watch them grow. Then the Cress pretty much frazzled. We’d left it growing too long and we couldn’t even sample it because it was all dried out and feeling sorry for itself.

As for the basil. The growing period for that is two weeks. It’s been a month now and it still looks like this…

Notice the failed cress up there too and the fallen cress that we over grew!

I’m not sure I’ll be attempting that vegetable plot any time soon!

That weed in the garden though…That is thriving!  But Zach has forgotten about it! Which is fine because it means I’ve got a nice warm bum!

I don’t often write posts about our weekend – most of the time there’s nothing majorly exciting to report. Every now and then though, a weekend is so grest that it has to be documented.  This weekend was one of them.

It all started Friday night when I’d changed my mind about the other half bringing home a bottle of wine. When I’d realised that I’d spent my whole day with my head in budgets, it felt like a good decision to make and we had a lovely Friday night having a little drink, watching TV and chatting.

Saturday was the biggie. A couple of weeks back,  I put Zach’s name down for Rugby Tots. A classic had started at the local leisure centre but booked really fast so I missed out. So I popped his name on the waiting list and with so much other interest a new class was started so I got him booked on immediately. It officially starts this coming Saturday but the coach was throwing a free trial session so we went along to see if it would be money well spent.

I honestly wasn’t sure how Zach would take to it. He can be really funny with new people and places and often has a refusal to do things. He’s familiar with the leisure centre because it’s where we go swimming but otherwise I wasn’t sure how he’d be. I clearly needn’t have worried. Upon walking into the section of the sports hall that it was taking part in, seeing lots of soft rugby balls dotted around and being told to have a kick around before the session started, he was straight in!

The session then started and whilst at first he was a bit apprehensive and tried to get us to do things with him, it only took him about a minute before he was confidently joining in, running back and forth, practising running with the ball and scoring tries along with an assault course that he loved!

It was after all of that when we discovered that we may have a little Johnny Wilkinson on our hands when it was time to practice goal scoring. Our boy has quite some kick on him and he scored not once but twice! Everyone including coach was so impressed! 

That brought us to the end of the half an hour session and he begged for more. Luckily there wasn’t another class for a couple of hours so coach let him stay and play a while longer with another little lad. He’s been talking about the session ever since so I think it’s safe to say that it’s already worth every penny spent. I already can’t wait to take him on Saturday – even though it’s at 8.30am!

There was a slight incident after the rugby when he decided to go into the park outside. As I topped the parking machine with a bit more money, he fell over in the mud!

Saturday was fantastic for a whole other reason as well. It was date afternoon/night. Yep. We were off out, just the two of us, into town to see a show and have dinner. My mum for our birthdays, had booked us tickets to see Woman in Black and it just so happened to be on Halloween…just to make it extra spooky. She had also offered her babysitting services and so at 1pm she turned up with the dogs and we headed off to Covent Garden. We got up there about an hour before the show so we meandered around, popping into shops I wouldn’t normally be able to browse in and having a peek around at the restaurants to see where we’d like to eat after the show. Suddenly it was time to head to the theatre for the start of the show.

The show was brilliant. A real slow burner but the acting was just incredible and the bits that made me jump also sent shivers down my whole body immediately afterwards. The theatre is so tiny it just adds to the spookiness. I loved it!

After the show finished we went to Maxwell’s Bar and Grill for a drink and dinner. We only had to wait about half an hour for a table so had a quick champagne cocktail to pass the time!

Once we were seated we had a feast of chicken, ribs and chocolate dessert along with a lovely bottle of wine.

We had contemplated going to a bar for a boogie and another drink but we decided that we would head on back and stop off at one of the local pubs on the way home for a final drink before going home and letting my mum get herself and the dogs home to bed. It was foggy at this point so not only was it super eerie but I was worried about mum getting home safely.

We had such a wonderful time. After my recent writing about us needing some together time, this was just perfect so thanks mum!

On Sunday, I got up and went to an exercise class. Yep, after my recent ramblings on how I’m feeling a bit frumpy again, I found an Insanity class just down the road and went along. There is a reason it’s called Insanity. It was hard, really hard. And intense. But I did it and I was proud for getting up and going on a cold foggy morning. Today though, I am feeling it. There isn’t a part of my body that isn’t aching! That’s good though right?! Even though I can’t walk properly?

After that I got myself ready and we headed over to the other half’s brother so we could see our niece who is turning one this week. Zach loves seeing his cousins and whilst it is a slightly mad couple of hours with them together, he never wants to leave. But leave we had to as I needed to get home to cook the roast. And that yummy roast ended our weekend nicely as Zach then went to bed and we sat down to catch up on X-Factor/blog/play computer games!  

What a ruddy fab weekend!