Jonathon Wardman

House Hunting

Monica and I have recently been looking to buy a house. We got a mortgage agreement in principal, set our budget and set about looking for houses.

Living in the south east of England house prices are notoriously high, so I thought I’d take a look at some areas I have a connection to and see what the same budget — £300,000 — would buy there. For reference, let’s see the kind of property £300k will buy in Surrey and Hampshire.

[read more]

We’re being painted

At least I think we’re going to get painted. And at least the outside of the house.

We did notice recently that the fascias of the house have started to look a bit shabby, in fact on the two highest points on our house and the one next door have started to totally peel off. Given the note we received said that they won’t be using scaffolding and the decorators did indeed arrive yesterday with a set of ladders on the roof of their van yesterday, I’m a little skeptical that they’ll be able to reach, let alone effectively paint, the higher points on our house which stand at over 3 stories high.

It’s also interesting to learn, two years after moving in, that we have a management company for the mews. [read more]

Fallout from a fickle industry

So Tim lost his job.  Oh well.

Let me explain.  Tim is an animator, he draws stuff.  Currently he works for Rare, a computer game studio owned by Microsoft.  It seems that this industry, like most industries based around the arts, is pretty fickle and unstable.  When there’s work on it’s great, when there isn’t then there’s a whole load of talented people all looking for work doing the same thing.  His contract was only ever short — 3 months I think initially extended to 6 months — working on the little rip-off Wii Mii things Microsoft are releasing as part of their XBox 360 dashboard enhancements this autumn.  He heard today that they wouldn’t be extending his contract simply because they don’t have any work for them to do. [read more]

Big Storm Type Thing

I have been meaning to write this for a while now, but I havnt got round to it, never mind, here it is –

We just got the TV working again today  – the ariel had been nocked out of place by the very stong winds that hit on Friday evening.  It was mad, just seemed to come from nowhere.

No warning or anything, I was just talking to my parents in the snug, when I saw that is was raining.  It rains alot, so thought nothing of it (why would you).  The electricicty in this house flickers on and off sometimes in the wind and rain and things, and the lights flickered a little, so I thought I would come up here and turn off my computer so I didn’t loose the work I had on it, so I came up, and was saving things and shutting it down, when the rain suddenly got really bad, and I mean really bad.  As my mum said – when you looked out of the window it looked as if you were under water, with the rain driving at the house.  The wind also go up, and just got worse, as I looked out of my window I could see the trees bent right over in the wind, it was really strong. [read more]