A Time of Magic

One recent surprise was a whole host of “sold” signs in the local area that seemed to pop up over the course of just a few weeks.

That would be something of a surprise at any time to be honest. This isn’t an area known for really rapid house sales and these days you’d have expected that sales would go even slower. Well, to be fair, the sales did take quite a while as the signs have been up for months but to have so many “sold” signs going up in such a short time is quite surprising.

Of course, what remains to be seen is whether the signs will remain at “sold” or if they’ll go back to “for sale” which has happened fairly frequently over the past year. One wonders what terms the mortgage calculator will have turned up for the various purchasers. Somehow I suspect that there’ll be rather high deposits required and probably none too good interest rates.

One of the annoying things about getting back into DIY is that you need to rebuild the toolkit and at the start you always seem to need a tool that you used to have.

I find that in practice I end up needing three trips to the local DIY shop for a lot of the jobs coming up these days. Once gets everything that you think you needed, the second to get the things that you realised later that you needed and the final time to pick up a couple of things that you hadn’t thought of but which you find you need once you start the job. It’s the trivial things that seem the most annoying, of course. Who’d have remembered to pick up a box cutter for instance?

Oh well, at least at this point the tools to deal with the majority of small jobs are already in the toolbox.