A shed or a cabin!

A few years ago, well only 3, which is only one more year than a couple! we bought a Billyoh shed. We spent ages researching which was going to suit what we needed and ordered it online. Big mistake! The floor rotted and fell through, the roof bow'd and all in all it was a massive pile of uselessness. I tried calling, email and writing to Billyoh but have never had a response.

So, we've torn that down and Mr Toon has built a new one. He ordered all the wood from a wood yard in Derby. When it arrived, I wondered if he'd ordered a bit too much, but turns out, nope, he was building a shed just slightly smaller than Windsor Castle!

Along with the shed we decided to buy a special saw thing (can't remember what it's call, but I'm freakin good at using it). I cut the wood, Mr Toon did the building business. As we wanted this to look really good, we decided to go for a tile effect shingle, which was slow to put on but looks fantastic.

All in all, it's cost us about £1200 but looking about, for this standard and size of shed, I think it would have cost well over £3,000, plus if Mr Toon and a split up, it's big enough for him to live in!

Warm and cosy

I'm going to put it out there, I really think Toon Towers is the cosiest house EVER. Now if you'd have asked me if our house was cosy this time 3 years ago when we had no proper heating, carpets, external wall insulation, insulated plasterboard, insulation in every void possible I have said through chattering teeth "nope, it's just freezing". And we had the privilege of  huge electric bills off nearly £1800 plus coal and gas bottles. Now with all the energy efficiency measures we've installed, our electricity bill is £700 per year and we earn between £500 and £600 for the solar. It's brilliant that our bills are so low now, for example because any excess solar power goes into heating our hot water and because we've had fairly sunny days for the past 10 days, we've had free hot water which definitely deserves a boom! But above all its so lush (flash back to the 80's for saying lush) it's so lovely and cosy, but on the rare occasions it's not warm enough we just stoke up the wood burner which tops up the whole house and looks so beautiful. Can't wait for the next phase of renovating the bathroom and kitchen, and change the front and back door which will just add to the cosy-ness!

Sooty but no sweep

This weekend we took the fire place off the wall in the lounge to clear out all the debris that had been dislodge having the chimney renovated and the wood burning stove fitted.

It's good to do this a couple of times a year anyway and we have the chimney swept once a year even though we don't use it as soot build up loosens all the time.

When we removed the fireplace the back was full of soot and chimney debris, which explained why it was leaking out the bottom! 

Bonkers!

I know this is a very British subject but how bonkers is this weather. We've been working out in the garden repairing the wind damaged screens but also strimming down the grass that has grown really fast over the past few weeks.

It's so mild today and the suns out so Toon towers is running on solar energy, which when you think about it, for 5 days to Christmas really is mad. I have got the wood burner going just to keep the temperature constant in the house. Because we're all electric if the house gets too cold it's a bugger to get warm again and costs a fortune!

My mum and dad have just bought an all electric and are going through the pains we had but they do have an existing heating system. They have the old fashioned storage heaters that to be fair chuck out some serious heat, however there seems little control over the temperature. They've had to switch 2 of the heaters off.

They're looking at changing their panel heaters to the Rointe heaters (http://rointe.co.uk/corporate/delta-heating-system/) we have them in our house but the newer version which can be controlled via an app (so much better than the remote control version). We've found them to be really good and the beauty is when you're renovating a house you can move them around until your ready and then hard wire them in.

We know they are energy efficient but definitely helped by the mad mild December. Our electric bill was nearly £100 less than 2014!

Just realised how long this post took to go up, bit word but worth a read!