Goodbye Naked Bloggers

Sad to say that this will be my last entry into The Naked Blogger’s. But all is not lost, we will be starting our new travel blog shortly afterwards.

Trying to think what the main theme to this one was. Our first one was a travel blog where we travelled around India, Shri Lanka and Thailand and upon our return Jim had it made into a book. Our second one was about the renovation of this house which culminated in us tying the knot whilst on holiday on the Queen Mary 2 around the Caribbean. Claire has just had that one made into a book that I am just reading at the moment. We had a second copy made which we have put into my mum and dad’s Christmas stocking. Thanks mum and dad for the money that we bought our Hong Kong Dollars, Australian Dollars and US Dollars with and still have some left to take in UK cash. I suppose that the theme of this blog was renovation and moving house. The first two blogs consisted of about 100 entries each, whereas this is the 286th entry for the Naked Bloggers. I suspect that when Claire has this made into a book it will cost a little more than the other two.

It all started with the renovation of our Two Mile Ash flat that we renovated with the intention of selling on but unfortunately this coincided with the UK (and world) property crash and we were unable to sell it for a fraction of its value before renovation. This stopped us in our tracks; we had originally intended to try and go it alone, rather than working for other people, to renovate and sell on a few times a year. We couldn’t have picked a worse time to start. Some say we should have seen it coming but it’s impossible to predict events like these. When I started buying the flats in the first place, on the other hand, it couldn’t have been a better time, just before they started rising fast. I didn’t start buying because I could see the future it was just good luck on that occasion. Once I had bought the first two and could see that you couldn’t go wrong it was only a matter of finding deposits and buying as many as possible. Why wasn’t everybody doing it? I soon found out that they were, it just hadn’t reached the press at that time.

The only thing for it was to rent the Two Mile Ash flat out for a year and see if things had changed by the next year. In the mean time the company that I had been contracting for about 7 years hit the recession and started making redundancies. You can’t keep a contractor on and make permanent staff redundant so I was the first to leave. Not very much chance of another contract in the current climate so Claire had the idea of renting our house out for a year. Our lovely new house that we had just renovated. The more I thought about it the better the idea became; it would give us an extra income at the same time as moving into the second flat on our sell list and thereby reducing our capital gains tax dramatically. The tenants had just moved out because water was coming through the ceiling from the flat above every time they used the bathroom which fused the electric. It was all a bit of a nightmare.

While we were there we renovated it to live in and sell, then we renovated our two Oldbrook flats completely with new kitchens and bathrooms etc while we put the city centre flat on the market which sold after a few months. Our original plan seemed to be back on but we somehow got there through the back door. I even managed to get a contract for a couple of months. Only trouble was it coincided with our first Oldbrook renovation. I was driving 200 miles at 4am Monday down to the South coast, starting work at 7am until 6pm for 4 days then driving the 200 miles home after work on Thursday so I could work 12 hours a day for 3 days on the renovation. It’s not possible to work like this for more than a few months or you will become ill. Luckily the contract came to an end and so did the renovation and we were able to sneak a couple of weeks in Goa before starting the second Oldbrook renovation next door. Around this time we sold the city centre flat but our house was still let out and we needed somewhere to live or rent. Good old Jimmy came to the rescue and said we could stay at Shirley’s house as she had moved back in with Jim again. Are you keeping up?

We had a couple of weeks before our house was due to complete so decided to get renovating immediately so we could have a couple of rooms done before we needed to move in. The bathroom was fine and we first only intended to make the kitchen good but as we found a cheap kitchen in the sales decided to replace it and tile the floor. It was the right choice and we had almost finished before we moved in. I guess it took us about 3 weeks in total; we are getting quite quick at this by now. It makes so much difference when you are doing it full time rather than in your spare time. Just finished that and moved in there and our Cranfield flat came back to us and we were able to renovate that with a new kitchen, bathroom and windows. We also managed to squeeze a few holidays in, to Turkey, Majorca, France, Germany and Cape Verde along with a few weekend breaks and canal boat trip. Just about finished now and I have almost told the entire Naked bloggers story in one entry; why did we need 285 other entries?

Thanks for following us and I hope that our next blog will be a little more interesting to follow; it will certainly be more interesting from a writer’s position.