Annual Spending Review - 2020

Well, 2020 is almost over.  Here's where all the money went, in what turned out to be a very unusual year for our spending patterns :-

click on the graphic for a larger image

See previous reviews for the 'Rules', e.g. the 2019 review ...

As usual, the graphic shows the highest spending categories for 2020 in descending order from the left, with the equivalent 2019 and 2018 percentages alongside.

Conservatory Design & Build - Part 4 - Finishing Works & Fit-out

With the building structurally complete and weathertight, finishing works could continue inside the conservatory at our leisure, and any remaining exterior jobs can be done as and when the weather permits.

Continuing with the diary from Part 3 ... 

laying carpet tiles on top of XPS insulation boards.  In this
picture, all the easy ones are down - the rest needed cutting to fit

Conservatory Design & Build - Part 3 - The Building Structure

The long-awaited doors and windows duly arrived, and on the scheduled date too, so it was time to assemble and erect the building.   

The delivery coincided with a short spell of fine weather, with no rain forecast for at least three days, so the intention was to complete the basic build and make the conservatory weathertight within this timescale.

The photo diary continues from Part 2 ...

the windows and door on the north face were pre-assembled
and in position within a few hours after delivery !

Investment Review - September 2020

Here's the regular quarterly update with valuations on 30 September :-

click on the graphic for a larger image ...

Conservatory Design & Build - Part 2 - Enabling Works

Following on directly from our Part 1 post, we've been continuing with the enabling works for the new conservatory.

The photo diary continues ...

the old guttering arrangement above my office door, 

also fed with a downpipe from the main roof

the new arrangement - a galvanised C-section purlin now carries the water to 

a tundish at the RH end. A second length of purlin below makes a face

 between them to add a board.   This board and the timber post structure on 

the right will provide a flat interface for the end of the conservatory to butt up against.

Conservatory Design & Build - Part 1 - Enabling Works

We'd previously thought about erecting a conservatory, but the difficulties to be overcome at our location seemed too complex to address without a lot of time to spare.

But we're currently spending much more time at home - I'm not sure if our usual autumn holiday will even be possible this year - and of course we also haven't been spending money on travelling, so now seems as good a time as any to look at a conservatory.

We began exploring options a month or so ago.  A DIY conservatory kit was first considered, but the companies I approached were not very responsive to non-standard layout queries and technical requirements.  So I very soon lost patience with them.

Design and Project Management is actually my business, so I decided that by designing and sourcing everything myself, we would get exactly what we wanted and it would likely be much less costly too, without a middleman taking a cut.

Anyway, finalising the required layout and design was the first objective.  We looked at several possibilities from a double-ended lean-to layout of just 3.5 metres length, then a similar arrangement at 5.0 metres, before finally electing to bring the new building right up against the face of the existing extension, making it single-ended and 7.4 metres long in total.   There are a few challenges in connecting the buildings together, as will be seen in the photo diary commencing below.

For the basic conservatory layout, we considered either dwarf walls or full height glass all around, but in the end I designed a hybrid version with a dwarf wall on the northern aspect that's visible to passers-by, and using full height glass for the long western elevation which can't be seen from anyone outside the garden, so privacy is not an issue here.

basic drawing of the design ...

We looked into the planning requirements and concluded that this design met all the criteria to be considered 'permitted development', e.g. additional side width not greater than half the width of the original house, nothing protruding forward of the principal elevation fronting the road, single-storey conservatory with total height < 4 metres, total built area less than 50% of the total curtilage, etc.

Unlike house extensions for which planning permission is required, conservatories are a special case and are exempt from having to use materials of a similar type, style and colour as the original house, although we'll try to make the front elevation blend in as sympathetically as possibe.  Additionally, Building Regulations are not applicable to conservatories provided a few very simple rules are followed.

But if you're looking to build something similar, then you'll need to do your own research on planning requirements and regulations depending on the design, location and size of the conservatory.

Garden update - Summer 2020 - Six on Saturday

1.  Garden Tools

We bought a cordless lawnmower in June, £100 from Lidl without any batteries or charger.  But I bought this model because I've ten (!) other cordless power tools in the same range and which all use the same batteries, so I've already four 4Ah & five 2Ah batteries, plus several chargers.

I'm impressed with this mower so far.  It's lightweight and very easy to handle, and can cut all our three lawn areas twice on a single charge using the 4Ah batteries.   It operates at twice the voltage of the other power tools in the range, and so takes two batteries to power it.

However, the petrol mower is still in the shed for now.  Keeping the lawns tidy every week in the summer is a world away from hacking down long wet grass during the winter and early spring, and I don't yet know how the cordless mower will perform then.

The other garden tools I have in the same cordless range are a chainsaw, a standard hedge trimmer, a long extendable hedge trimmer and a pressure washer.

Investment Review - June 2020

Here's the combined portfolio summary sheet updated on 30 June :-

click on the graphic for a larger image ...

Hedge gap in-filling by underplanting - Six on Saturday

Since we removed our old greenhouse, we've exposed a four-metre length of the old hawthorn hedge at the northern boundary.

Although it has quite healthy upper growth and is still making good shows of blossom and berries, this hedge is very old and spans the length of the boundary which we took over when we bought the slice of additional land to the west to extend our garden.

Amateurish attempts have been made in the past to 'lay' the hedge by partially cutting through some of the trunks and bending them over to the horizontal so they maintain a growing connection with the tree, but then sprout more upward branches to fill in the lower areas. 

However, what with this poor quality laying and the lower part of the hedge being shaded by our old greenhouse for seven years, the base of the hawthorn hedge is very open and provides little or no low-level cover and wind protection to the garden now that the greenhouse has gone.  

And hawthorn is deciduous, so it will be even worse during the winter months when there are no leaves on the upper branches.

large gaps lowdown in the hedge behind the retaining wall
(photo taken before we moved the fig tree here)

Although winds from the north are not too common here, when they do arrive they're usually strong and very cold, so we thought we'd try to fill the lower gaps to protect the garden, and with a longer-term view of creating a full-height evergreen screen.

Repairing a failed Double-glazed Window Unit

Our living room sealed double-glazed unit has failed.  The sealing has been breached and allowed moist air to enter which has become trapped and resulted in mist patches and water droplets condensing on the inside faces of the glass panels.

you'll need to look very closely to see the water droplets between
 the panes at the bottom, and the line of misting near the top...

close-up of the bottom right corner ...

and in the centre...

Last year we also had a failure of a similar sealed double-glazed panel in our bedroom window.   In this case, we ordered a new glazed unit from a manufacturer around 80 miles away, and picked it up ourselves in the back of the car.  We then swapped it out with the failed panel, which we took to the local tip.  The new panel was less than £100, so a reasonably cost-effective DIY repair.

However, this same process wasn't an option this time around because the failed window in the living room is much larger, so it wouldn't fit in the car and the manufacturer we used last time won't deliver so far from their base.  Other online glaziers wanted ridiculous sums of money to manufacture a new unit to my dimensions, and anyway only a very few offered a delivery service.

We don't want to spend too much money on this window repair, because I think all the windows on the house will need replacing within the next few years anyway.  They're at least thirty and maybe even forty years old.

So I decided to repair this failed window unit myself, or at least to improve its appearance, by trying to remove the trapped water from between the panels.   

Assuming we don't break the glass, then the worst that can happen is the repair doesn't work, so it's definitely worth a try.

on a white theme ... Six on Saturday

New Zealand holly bush, olearia macrodonta ...

click on any photo for a larger image ...

In flower today - Six on Saturday ...

first of the bright orange poppies ...

Relocating the Fig Tree ... Six on Saturday

When we built our fig tree planter, we packed out the base with layers of bricks to make an inner wall below the soil level, to confine the tree roots.  This is supposed to improve fruiting.

However, when combined with the soil mix and a fig tree that's grown considerably larger in the past three years, it also makes the planter extremely heavy !   The weight hasn't been a problem until now, because we've never tried to move it more than a few feet, and then we just skidded it around on its base.

But this week we decided to relocate this planter to the new paved area at the front corner of the garden, created when we demolished the old greenhouse.   This new spot gets much more sun throughout the course of the whole day, although it's not quite as warm as the old location which is a semi-enclosed sun trap formed by the kitchen wall, workshop extension wall and the boundary fence at the east.

old location, sheltered and very warm, but only
a few hours of direct sunlight each day 

So, how to move this very large planter from outside the back door and around to the new paved area, a distance of some 30 metres ?

Gardening on the other side of the world ...

A few months back, I stumbled upon the Australian equivalent of the BBC's Gardeners' World television show, i.e. ABC's Gardening Australia.

This programme has been running for over thirty years down under, and I think it's quite good.  There's typically more than 40 shows each year, all of them an hour long.

I've streamed several episodes that were broadcast over the past few years, and as well as seeing some wonderful new native and exotic plants (and pests) you can also pick up some really interesting hints and tips, and see how the approach to cultivation and pruning etc, often of the exact same plants, differs significantly from what's common practice at home. 

Water conservation and re-use for irrigation is also a very big theme throughout the shows.   And there are some other very interesting differences.   The presenters bang on all the time about how great it is to have a north-facing garden, which of course is not ideal here in Europe.

In the northern hemisphere, the sun appears to travel in a clockwise arc from east to west throughout the day.  But of course, south of the equator it appears to travel counter-clockwise, and in the northern sky.  And although I knew this already, having travelled in southern Africa and South America, it's not something I've ever really given much thought to in gardening terms - south equals sun is an ingrained concept here !

The programme features regular presenters from most of the Aussie states, from the tropics in the far north, the subtropics of coastal Queensland, Perth in the west, the arid heartlands of the country and the temperate regions around most of the southern coastline.

But it's the stuff from the cooler regions of Victoria and Tasmania that I find most fascinating.  They grow a lot of the same flowers and edibles that are garden favourites here in the UK, too.

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 3 - Six on Saturday

This is the final instalment of our major project to demolish the old greenhouse, clear the space to make a paved courtyard area and build a new greenhouse alongside, re-using the glass panels.

Since the last post, I've terminated the incoming power cable from the mast, although I haven't yet ran an internal cable from the isolator and installed a socket point.  We've no pressing need for electricity in the greenhouse at this time of year, but in the autumn we'll likely install some LED lighting and the sockets can also be used for heated propagators etc next year. 

The aluminium louvre covers for the rear upper vents arrived, and these were fitted in five minutes.

isolator switch, and vent louvre from the inside ...

Building Raised Beds - Six on Saturday ...

Yet another lockdown garden landscaping project ...

Inspired by some new raised beds I saw during a review of the Six-on-Saturday submissions recently, I decided to re-configure our main vegetable growing space, referred to as the 'side bed' in our garden layout. 

We have several types of vegetable seeds germinating in cells in the greenhouse, and our trays of leeks and onions sown earlier in the year are too small for planting out yet, so we've still plenty of time to prepare these particular vegetable beds.  We've already planted out garlic in the front bed, and sown radishes and spring onions in the cold frame.

Here's the 'before' picture of the space, although this was actually taken after I'd already relocated our large stainless steel table, which itself took a couple of hours what with first moving our quince tree (it's in a large planter), putting down a weed membrane, repositioning a few paving stones to fit under the table legs, emptying the shelf of all the bags of compost & stones, then shifting the table and replacing everything.

the side bed - that's our cold frame on the right, with the glass removed ...

To make the new raised beds, I still had a lot of pieces of unused wood lying around after the new greenhouse build, most of them offcuts of various lengths but also four full-length timbers.  I'd intended to use this wood to re-make the garden gate, but that job can now wait until later in the year at which time, hopefully, the timber yards will be open again.

"Is this some kind of bust ?"

"Well, it's very impressive, yes, but we need to ask you a few questions".

In memory of the actress Gina Mastrogiacomo, who died in 2001 aged 39 ...  I first saw this film in a cinema in San Diego when visiting a friend who worked in the shipyards.

Anyway, at the end of a business trip to the Netherlands in early February of this year, my wife and I stayed in a hotel on the seafront at Scheveningen for our last night. 

Scheveningen - photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas

On the morning of the Sunday, before we drove to catch the overnight ferry departing from Ijmuiden to Newcastle, we visited a large and popular fleamarket in the centre of The Hague and one of the things we bought was a large plaster bust, for 20 euros.

It's a good size, around 550 mm (22") tall.  I thought it might be a copy of some famous sculpture, but if so then I couldn't find any reference to the original during an internet search after we'd brought it home.   I also researched the subject matter to see if I could identify a particular Greek or Roman goddess, but that also failed due to a lack of iconography - the girl in the bust is simply holding a shawl around her shoulders, and is not carrying anything.

We thought the bust would look good on a plinth as the centrepiece within our new circle in the front garden.

The only problem being, of course, that it's cast in plaster and not resin or concrete, so if it was left outside unprotected it would likely dissolve into a puddle of gypsum slurry after the first heavy rains.

Back in February we'd bought some specialist stone-effect spray paint and clear lacquer to protect it - the paints actually cost more than we'd paid for the bust - but it was too cold and wet for painting at that time.

The paint was to turn it back into its original colour, because it had been hand-painted by a previous owner and they hadn't made a very good job of it.  The lacquer is required so that the bust will shed water without it soaking in to the surface of the plaster and causing damage.

So, during a recent spell of fine weather, it was time to tackle this mini-project.

Financial Planning - 2020 Review

We're now seven years into the 10-year plan, and so here are the usual two graphs :-

SAVINGS POT to Mar-20

SIPP POT to Mar-20

After a very good year in 2019, we had been creeping ever closer to the targets, which will be met when the combined portfolio reaches a 225% increase over its March 2013 baseline value.  

And then 2020 arrived ...

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 2 - Six on Saturday

Following on from our Part 1 post last week, this is where we left the project.

The first post described the process up to completion of the basic timber framework. 

Investment Review - March 2020

Well, that first quarter of 2020 was certainly interesting ...

For a change, this time we'll lead with the progress graph rather than the spreadsheet summary.

(click on any of the images for a larger view)

In this first period of 2020, I've had three consecutive months of negative investment returns (-0.9%, -4.1% and a whopping -7.9% in March), resulting in large falls in the combined portfolio value.    

Mind you, in the middle of March the monthly return looked like it could possibly end up at -15% or even worse, but a bounce from the start of the fourth week means the portfolio value today is back to the same level it was in February 2019.  

But I'd been waiting for some sort of a dip, even though its size was totally unexpected, and so I've used some of the cash in the accounts to buy more equity funds.

There may well be more more falls to come in this slump, and many businesses will likely never recover from the effects of the forced closures, but from within the depths of today's doom and gloom there still seems to be upside potential for equities.

The glass is still half full.

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 1 - Six-on-Saturday

In the early spring of 2013, we built our large greenhouse using 14 shower panels we'd picked up on the cheap.   

This 12' x 6' 6" (3.6 x 2.0 m) building has served us extremely well for the last seven years, but during the winter we made a decision to demolish it and re-use the glass panels to make a similar smaller greenhouse in a slightly different location.  There were a few reasons for this :-

• some of the greenhouse roof beams are suffering from rot which may soon become a structural problem, so they'd have needed replacing anyway.

• we want to reclaim the corner of the garden where the larger greenhouse is currently sited.  With the greenhouse removed, it's a large paved area surrounded by a concrete plinth, so it's an ideal place to plant some shrubs either in large pots and / or by selectively removing a few of the paving slabs and planting directly into the ground.

• by building a smaller greenhouse than the original, we can re-use all of the glass panels and make it glass-sided all around - at present, the back (north) wall is made from timber, and although we'd faced the panelling with reflective aluminium foil insulation, the back side of the greenhouse is still a little dark. 

I could have removed all the glass panels, and then just modified the existing carcass to make a smaller greenhouse, repairing the roof in the process, but I think that's actually much more work than building a new framework from scratch.  It would also have been very heavy to move, even though it's not far to drag it over to its new position.

So, before our recent holiday, I'd drawn up plans for a new 8' x 6' (2.4 x 1.8 m) greenhouse and prepared a base using paving stones I'd recovered from elsewhere in the garden.  

new greenhouse base area cleared and levelled ...

Not waving, but drowning ...

The huge scale of the stock market falls over the last three weeks has actually resulted in two of my individual brokerage accounts being underwater when compared to the initial sums invested.

Below is the performance of each of the accounts, simply showing their current value against all of the cash ever added to them - the dates in brackets are the periods in which contributions were made.   They're not adjusted for inflation or anything else ...

• ISA 1 (2007-2010), +79.8%

• ISA 2 (2010-2013), +0.8%

• ISA 3 (2013-2017), +15.2%

• ISA 4 (2017-2020),  -9.4%

• SIPP (2010-2020),  -3.9%

Lockdown in Tenerife ... updated

Today is Day 19 of our planned 28-day break in Tenerife.

We went out earlier this afternoon on our hired motorbike.  It seemed quiet on the streets, but it's Sunday and today's the first day since we arrived when overcast conditions have persisted into the afternoon, so I didn't read anything unusual into it.  The sky's clearing up now, and it looks like it'll be a nice evening as usual.

We rode up to the east side of Los Cristianos, near to where all the motorhomes park up for the night, and went onto the rocks for a spot of fishing.   We've been there a few times in the last couple of weeks, and many times during previous trips here - this time, we've seen motorhomes registered in many other countries, and from as far away as Scandinavia and Bulgaria.  

A few other people were around, walking on the beaches or clambering over the rocks, but we were the only ones fishing today.

We'd been there for a couple of hours when my wife noticed a pair of police officers gesticulating from the car parking area, but we were a couple of hundred metres away and couldn't hear them above the sound of the waves, so we just ignored them.  Anyway, I had an idea what they might have wanted from reading the news last night ...

Thoughts on the Investment Portfolio ...

In the last couple of years, it's fair to say we've experienced both good and bad periods of investment performance.

Today, the FTSE100 is hovering around 6,000 which is a year-to-date fall of 20%, but my combined portfolio return is 'only' down by 7.5%, so I suppose it's not doing too badly in the grand scheme of things.

Psychologically, it's best to think of losses in percentage terms because even 7.5% represents a shitload of the actual folding stuff !  

So what have we learnt ?


1)  Well, some holdings don't seem to contribute much to the portfolio under any circumstances :-

RCP.L was bought a few years ago as a 'defensive' holding, but despite its track record over longer time periods it hasn't done very much at all for my portfolio.  It doesn't throw off anything significant in terms of a dividend, it doesn't produce much of a capital gain during rising markets (fair enough) but it didn't provide downside protection during the recent sharp slump either, falling by almost the same amount as the markets. 

Although to be fair, it hasn't actually lost me money yet in nominal terms at least, it certainly hasn't displayed the more defensive qualities I'd expected in terms of holding onto at least some of its gains from the good times, which is my own fault for not sufficiently researching its composition.  I might as well have just kept the cash in the accounts for several years.

However, I'm keeping an eye on it now - when / if the markets return to some sort of normality, I'd expect RCP's price to have risen too, due to its equity components and maybe the re-establishment of a premium to its NAV (although that could take a long time for many of the stricken ITs).  I'll then probably sell out and either hold the proceeds as cash or re-invest in something like CGT.L.

The end of the world as we know it ?

Well, the stock markets around the world have certainly suffered a rout this week.

Last Friday, 21 February, the FTSE100 closed at 7,404.  It closed today at 6,581 representing a one-week fall of 11.1% and now dipping into 'correction' territory. 

run away, run away !!

Today's the last working day of the month, so as usual I've updated my combined portfolio spreadsheets and the summary doesn't make very pleasant reading.   And until Monday of this week, February had seemed quite a decent month !

My portfolio return for February was -4.1%, and is -5.0% since the beginning of the year.  It's holding up better than the FTSE100 but is still well down in absolute cash terms (this -4.1% is the biggest monthly fall I've encountered in the seven years since I started tracking everything properly - the previous worst month had been -4.0% in August 2015).

But isn't this slump in the equity markets exactly what we've all been waiting for, at least those of us still in the accumulation phase ? 

So, how best to capitalise on what could either be a time-limited buying opportunity or a razor-sharp falling knife ? 

Hard Landscaping in the Front Bed - Six on Saturday

Back in 2017, our neighbours gave us the outer ring sector stones from a brand new 2.7 metre (9') diameter paving circle - they'd only laid the two inner rings themselves in their back garden.  

I spotted the pieces being loaded into the boot of their car and asked what they intended to do with them, and they were actually going to take them to the tip !   These are cut from stone, not mould-formed in concrete, so I bet the full circle kit was very expensive and, of course, it being the outer ring they were discarding, they were throwing away around three-quarters of the weight of all the stone they'd paid for ...

Anyway, we managed to rescue them, and for the last couple of years these 24 sectors have formed a winding path across the length of the side bed (see also the satellite image on our garden layout post).

As with almost all our paving, the stones were simply laid loose onto levelled and compacted soil - no hardcore foundations or mortar bed fixings - because it's not the first time we've decided to relocate sections of paving.

the long and winding road, to the left...

And last week, we decided to move all these paving stones to the front bed and reconfigure them to their intended purpose, i.e. as a ring.  

From a different perspective - Six on Saturday

We're currently away on holiday in much warmer climes, but I regularly check out the old homestead via our IP video cameras.   These automatically capture still images every 30 seconds and also record video when motion is detected in certain areas.

One of these cameras is a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) unit mounted on a tall pole above the apex of the first-floor extension gable, which can be controlled remotely over the internet and affords a panoramic view of the garden, so I took a few stills this morning and thought I'd join in again with the Six-on-Saturday crowd hosted by The Propagator.

Investment Review - December 2019

Welcome to this end of 2019 round-up of the investment portfolio.   I seem to be making a habit of reporting these quarterly reviews whilst on holiday - this year, we decided to take the first of our longer winter breaks around a week earlier than usual, so we're celebrating the New Year in the warmth and sunshine.

Anyway, here's the latest spreadsheet based on data from the early market closing time on 31 December 2019 :-

click on the table for a larger image ...