The best home owner job

We talk a lot about what it’s like owning a house. Kev has been renovating and expanding his vast property empire for many years now, of course, while I have been steadily improving our premises with the aid of a toolbox large enough to use as a double garage. Now that Ian has joined the home owner club we have been doing our best to gently and constructively guide him in his new duties.

But I sometimes think that all too often we discuss the downsides: the amount of maintenance work, the unexpected costs, the speed with which nature will reclaim your carefully tended garden as wilderness. So I thought it might be nice to talk about the good bits of owning a house, because some of the things an Englishman has to do to look after his castle are actually very satisfying.

I will open the bidding with pressure washing.

Pressure washing is brilliant.

I love my pressure washer, but for whatever reason I hadn’t taken it out for a spin for about 18 months. Then, the other day, we’d had a drain unblocked and the drainage gully running through the paving down the side of the house needed clearing of all the crap that had built up, so I got the Kärcher out of the garage and fired it up. And once it was out, that was me set for the afternoon. Everything got jet washed.

The best part was discovering that the paving stones around the front and side of the house actually have a colour, as pictured above. I spent a very happy hour effectively colouring them in.

ABOFB: Nip to the loo

Welcome to back to a breath of fresh beans, this week we’re just going to nip to the loo, don’t worry, not literally (we did that before we started recording).

Suggestions in this pod are:

Weird
Posh
Nosy
Espionagey

Mortgage statement

Massive Bankers Plc

Mortgage Centre
High Interest House
Cashola Park
Nottingham
NG1 8JU

Dear Mr. Marshall

ANNUAL MORTGAGE STATEMENT

Product	Absolute Swizz Bankers Rate Fix v9
Mortgage Number	1563786454
Property Address	Force It Up Your Richard Hampshire Near France

OVERVIEW OF YOUR MORTGAGE FOR THE PERIOD 23 JANUARY 2024 TO 23 JANUARY 2025

Opening balance	£205,466.54
Repayment 23 January 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Repayment 23 February 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Repayment 23 March 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Repayment 23 April 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Repayment 23 May 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Repayment 23 June 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Repayment 23 July 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Repayment 23 August 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Repayment 23 September 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Repayment 23 October 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Repayment 23 November 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Repayment 23 December 2024 – thank you	–£1325.63
Interest charged	£7208.44
On Time Repayment Fee	£2101.03
BOE Interest Rate Above 3% Penalty	£883.97
Monthly Direct Debit Fee	£1783.88
Non-Dollar Transaction Surcharge	£1326.10
Window Tax	£604.14
Massive Bankers Plc Christmas Bonus	£2000.00
Remaining balance	£205,466.53

If you require help with your mortgage or making repayments, log in to our online banking portal using your customer number, account number, unique password, three letters of your passphrase and a weird plastic calculator thing. Our AI bots are waiting to help you but will never pass you on to a human being.

Yours sincerely,

Ava Pricey-Holme
Chief UK Mortgage Account Executive Officer

DiJaBringaBeer

I know nothing about the owner of this house.

I know nothing about the owner of this house except that they named their house this.

Imagine coming up with this.

Imagine coming up with it and thinking it was so good, so funny, so enduring in its humour that it wouldn’t just bring you joy and laughter in this one moment where you thought of it, but it would continue to bring you joy and laughter for years to come.

Imagine thinking that it would bring joy and laughter to other people if you stuck it on the front of your house.

Imagine applying to the Royal Mail to change the name of your property. Applying to the council to have it amended in their records. Speaking to people at every bank and utility company who have your details to explain to them, and spell out letter by letter, your brilliant joke, so that it would appear on all the post addressed to you.

Imagine going in to Timpson’s and asking them for a rustic wooden house sign in sustainable pine with bark surround and telling them that this is the word you want them to engrave into it using three-inch-high letters in Chancery Bold Italic.

Imagine that.

Midlife Crisis

I’m not sure if a building built in the 1500’s can be said to be having a mid life crisis in 2024, but if it can, then this one is. Like a post-divorce Michael Gove popping up in an Aberdeen nightclub, Temple Newsham is entering it’s “rave stage”.

We visited on Sunday and it was off it’s tits on something. The whole garden had been filled with mysterious lights (and hairy balls) and it had put it’s loudest attire on to have a good old boogie.

Fair play I say. Happy New Year all!

WFH

My job isn’t one you can do from home, so while the rest of the world has spent the last few years abandoning the office, I’ve still been turning up in person like some sort of mug.

The other day I had the opportunity to spend a day working from home, and grabbed it with both hands. I had lots of project work to do and none of it required me to be in the building: I had some training videos that needed voiceovers recording, I had documentation to write and I had some development work to do on some internal web tools I wrote. So on Friday I fired up a work laptop at home and got stuck in.

Not only did I get more sleep and avoid the time and cost of about 3½ hours of commuting, I also got loads done. Here is a summary of how I spent my ten hour shift.

Activity	Duration
Attend morning meeting for WFH staff through my phone because the laptop wasn’t logged in yet	0h 30m
Struggle to get the work laptop to connect to my home wifi and talk to IT support about proxy settings	0h 45m
Check emails	0h 10m
Make coffee, get distracted by arrival of post	0h 10m
Open training slides in Powerpoint, set up USB microphone and headphones, test setup, get distracted and read news articles on the Guardian website	1h
Do Guardian Quick Crossword #16972	0h 15m
Start recording voiceover, discover time limit on Powerpoint recordings, search for alternative screen recording software, install on work laptop	0h 25m
Dog arrives in room, play with dog	0h 30m
See message on phone, reply to message, see notification on Reddit, scroll through Reddit	0h 20m
Break for lunch	1h
Unlock laptop, set Teams status to “available”; toilet break	0h 10m
Start recording voiceover with new software, get lost on complex slide animation twenty minutes in, discover there is no edit feature, resign self to having to start recording again, become despondent about project, make tea, look at phone again for a bit	1h 30m
Let dog out for a wee, throw ball for dog which gets dog excited, dog spends extended period of time on very wet lawn, dog runs back inside and through house with muddy paws. Clean dog’s paws. Clean kitchen, dining room and hallway floors with Dettol wipes	0h 45m
See email from team leader asking how day is going, redraft reply eight times, eventually just say it’s going well thanks	0h 15m
Notice office-hours staff will be leaving work in 15 minutes, write email asking complex question about SQL database backups for web app that I need to work on, send email slightly too late for it to be seen or dealt with before Monday	0h 30m
Rehearse complex slide animation that tripped me up before, change animation after rehearsal, fail to rehearse new animation sequence	0h 30m
Make tea, get distracted by dog, play with dog	0h 30m
Start recording voiceover, get lost on changed animation sequence twenty minutes in, plough on anyway since interest in project is now waning, continue to end of recording	0h 40m
Discover freeware screen recording software has recorded in some random format to some place in the cloud, attempt to download and convert this to something useful	0h 20m
Send email to team leaders shared inbox about something unrelated to today’s work to prove I am still online at the end of my shift	0h 5m
Log off	0h 5m

Everybody has a house now

We have reached a momentous landmark in the life and times of the Beans Massive, which is that all of us – every single Bean – now owns a house.

To commemorate this occasion, I have had three beautiful portraits specially commissioned, that each recreate the atmosphere and excitement on the day we moved in to our houses.

Please enjoy these fine works of art. If you would like the original to frame and hang over your fireplace, get in touch and we can discuss terms.

Tile Saga: dénouement

Time to wrap up this saga. The tiling is complete, at least until I get round to starting the other bit of tiling around the worktop at the other side of the utility room.

Here’s the epilogue, expressed in short form because life is short:

Grouting is great. Tiling was a pain in the backside but I could spend a lot of time grouting. It’s not difficult and the results are instantly gratifying. Slopping grout into all the gaps covers a multitude of sins, instantly makes your tiles look good, and ten minutes later you wipe off the excess with a damp sponge and the job is done. All DIY should be like this.
Silicone sealant can mack right off. I’ve dabbled in this before, and hated it. Now I’ve done it more extensively to finish this tiling job and I hate it even more.
I haven’t yet sealed one side where the tiles meet the back wall of the room, because I put super gentle non-peel expensive Frog Tape on the wall to protect it from the grout and when I carefully peeled it off according to the instructions the super gentle non-peel expensive Frog Tape took all the paint off the wall, which I only painted a couple of months ago. So now I have to repaint that part before I can put a line of sealant there.

Now I get to move on to another job, and commence Raised Bed and Gravel Path Saga. Watch out for this year’s longest and most self-pitying read, coming to a Beans near you this autumn.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Abodes