Welcome to the start of the second year of our five year challenge to pay off our mortgage. So far we are on track, but things have slowed down considerably in the last few months after some emergency repairs to our car totalling over £1000, in addition to a boiler break down.
This month we have paid off another 1% bringing our total paid off to date to 25%. Although we haven’t had much extra money to throw at the mortgage, we have been busy behind the scenes. We belong to Freecycle (online community whereby people offer up things they no longer want for free) and were blessed to be offered 18 old pine doors. We have replaced our five doors using these old pine doors, which look just amazing in our ancient house!
In addition, T12 is making a cold frame from the doors which had glass panels; Gary has split our L-shaped hallway into two using one of the doors; and he is putting another doorway in to cut off a redundant porchway, which we will then use as our school storage:
Our goal is to completely change half of our hallway into a school/project room, and this has really helped to start the process.
Again from Freecycle was the acquisition of a green house. T12 is in heaven! We still need to erect it, but we are very excited about the possibilities this will afford T12 in the gardening department.
And we were also given some beautiful, new circular paving. We intend to use this to make a patio in our garden which Gary had cordoned off last summer:
We haven’t put it down yet but soon. We feel so blessed to have obtained all this for free!
One final piece of news, sad this time. Princess Omelette, C11’s hen died last week. She was distraught. We have not a clue what she died of, but we read that occasionally hens do just die. We had a ceremonial burying, followed by lots of cuddles. C11 drew a picture of Princess Omelette, which she keeps pinned on her board next to her bed, to remember her by!
And that is all our news for this month.