33 signs that you are addicted to DIY

• You show pictures of your shelves at parties.

• You start moulding intricate kitchen suites of your mashed potato at dinner, accessorising with peas.

• You know over 25 handy and unusual ways to stop flesh wounds from bleeding.

• Writing a pros and cons list of different nail gun models before you make a decision on which one to buy. In doing this you go over 5 pages of A4.

• You secretly wish for your house to fall down so that you will have a legitimate reason to build an elaborate tree dwelling.

• You looked at your neighbour’s new £500,000 orangery and thought “I could make one of those, easy peasy.”

• When you overhear an attractive girl talking to her friend and mentioning the word “stripping” you interrupt to remind her to wear gloves and work in a well ventilated area.

• You set up your own nifty blog site that you call “Home Heroes”, so that you can upload photographs of your own handiwork to share with others of like mind.

• You haven’t actually got round to uploading anything onto “Home Heroes” yet because you have been so engrossed with enthralling new DIY projects.

• You dream about staring in your own Tim Allen-style home improvement TV show and have already picked a theme tune.

• Waiting until your wife is asleep you shuffle furtively out of bed to go and look at pictures of power drills on the internet.

• You name your twins Black & Decker.

• You name your dog DeWalt

• You have wet dreams about variable speed hammer drills.

• You have 5 ongoing DIY projects all 90% finished.

• You use Duct tape to wrap birthday presents.

• You invest in designer safety glasses.

• You lust after Batman’s utility belt.

• You have regular nightmares about running out of ammunition for your nail-gun in a critical DIY moment.

• You constantly lust for more power and higher rotations.

• You spend more money on tools and wood than it would cost to get a builder in.

• You don't have a pair of shoes without paint splatters on them.

• You've been electrocuted. More than once.

• You've had a homemade flood. More than once.

• Your home insurance company refuses to give you the standard rate.

• You have the outline of all your tools drawn on the shed wall where their meant to be put.

• Whenever mashed potato is served, you ‘plaster’ it over everything else on the plate.

• You and your friends have DIY parties that involve BYO bottle and drill.

• You feel sorry for power tools that you’re not using very much.

• You know that the guy who mixes the paint in B&Q has a wife, two kids and a dog called Brian.

• You suffer from drill bit envy.

• You know precisely how many spare nails you have left.

• You have at least two spare batteries for your power drill, and one’s charging right now.

Can't be bothered to do DIY for lodgers anymore

I rent out a couple of properties to tenants and have done for the past five years. I have recently been thinking of selling due to the amount of DIY time it can suck up, but obviously at this current time its not an easy time to do such.

I have delayed selling to wait for the outcome of the Treasury and its potential changes to Stamp Duty.

Arguably many BTL properties fall below the £125,000 threshold, so would not be impacted, but the sale of some of these properties may be held up as buyers moving up the property ladder await any reduction in Stamp Duty on higher value properties.

There are good reasons to believe that the house sector is weathering the storm:

• Tenant Demand
  
  Evidence of good rental growth across the UK can be found not only in the latest RICS Lettings Survey with a headline of "Lettings market shines bright in housing gloom" but also in Paragon's Buy To Let Index for July where yields across the UK are 6.4% with average growth in the last year of 9.3%. Additional demand is being driven by the reduced availability of mortgages at 100% or above for first time buyers who will need to rent until they can save up the necessary deposit and with higher interest rates being charged on borrowing at thee 95% level , it may be more expensive to pay a mortgage than rent for the time being.



• Mortgage Funding
  
  Current funding is based on the known performance of the Buy To Let mortgage book and the recently released CML figures look relatively benign with only 1.1% of loans in arrears over 90 days compared to the broader market figure of 1.33% but still up from 0.73% at the end of 2007. Any significant deterioration would cause lenders to re-trench further at a time when BTL landlords are probably the best hope for the property market absorbing the CML predicted 28,000 repossessions in the second half of the year.




• Mortgage Availability
  
  One year on from the credit crunch, the BTL sector has fewer lenders with tighter credit criteria and risk based pricing encouraging landlords to invest more capital in return for better interest rates. Pricing as low as 5.09% for a 2 year fix at 60% loan to value with higher pricing is applied by those lenders still willing to lend to 85% but with increasing dependency on retail deposits to fund new lending the cost is reflected with rates more in the range 6.5% to 7.5%.




• Preferred Property Sectors
  
  The new homes sector had always been popular with investors in a rising market - where there was no property chain and the opportunity to buy off plan with completion up to eighteen months away held out the prospect of capital appreciation for little risk in the early years of the new millennium. By early 2007 some developers were creating artificial incentives to lure in investors leading to concerns over the true value of developments where upwards of 40% of the units were sold to investors. This has led to rental problems and geographical concentration risk and lenders have placed a 75% LTV restriction and full transparency on the component parts of the transaction. This is bound to impact the house building sector and the results of Taylor Wimpey on 27 August announcing a 96% fall in pre-tax profits and exceptional items of a further £1.5Bn must reflect some of these issues. Effectively the development of sites has mostly ceased as builders concentrate on selling existing stock before developing subsequent phases. Whilst house prices have eased there are not sufficiently large volumes of properties being sold to suggest a collapse of the broader market.



• Market Confidence
  
  Paragon's July Trends Review reveals that investor sentiment towards acquiring further property remains strong with twice as many landlords looking to add properties than intending to sell. This is driven by a belief that they can secure a lower price as well as being high tenant demand being a key factor for 39.3% of them.



• Feel good Factor
  
  There is one additional confidence element that impacts the whole country and that is the somewhat unexpected "feel good factor" that has been created by the well deserved success of Team GB in Bejing. Not only has it dominated the headlines and pushed away the doom and gloom headlines on the property market and economy at large but has created a genuine interest in London 2012. When France won the Football World Cup in 2006 the GDP growth in the next quarter was 0.5% above the predicted rate. The benefit to the UK may last sufficiently long enough for other potential positive measures to show through such as a Base Rate reduction of 0.25% in early November or, heaven forbid, the Government untangling the Stamp Duty fiasco with a stepped aligned on price bands and a raising of the "zero" band to £250,000 - is that too much to hope for ?

“Sumbunny sabe me!”

20040806-rabbit.jpg (JPEG Image, 300x348 pixels) via kwout

A rabbit might save your life but it won’t compensate you when your house burns down.

Anyone else hear about the Australian house bunny that saved a couple from burning to death in their own home? Well, if you haven’t, the story goes that Mr Keogh and Miss Finn, blissfully asleep in their bedroom whilst their house was burning around them were woken up by the pounding of rabbit feet on their bedroom door. The rabbit, inventively named “Rabbit” saved the day by alerting his owners to the fire that had started in one of the back rooms of the house. Unfortunately for the couple, Rabbit couldn’t save the thousands of pounds that the couple spent on renovations that had just been completed days before the fire broke out.

Some people have pointed out that Rabbit was probably just trying to save himself rather than altruistically trying to rescue his sleeping owners. This is probably right however there have been various claims to suggest that our bouncy fluffy friends have more carrot than we credit them for. There have even been accounts of bunnies helping other species, by alerting their owners to floundering fish that have propelled themselves out of their bowl.

Amazing I know but still, I would rather rely on a fire alarm than a giant house bunny to wake me if there was (god forbid) a blaze at my house. You would have thought that what with all the expensive renovations the hapless couple might have thought that installing one was probably a good idea-considering. If you have the money to improve living standards then why not improve safety standards while you’re at it?

Let’s just hope that the unfortunate couple had home insurance eh? They don’t sound like the brightest nails in the hutch and you could say they might be a carrot short of a picnic (I could do this all day but I won’t torture you with it) but I certainly think that a few lessons could be learned here.

Lesson 1) Smoke alarm step ONE, renovations step TWO
Lesson 2) Home insurance is a GOOD idea
Lesson 3) Rabbits save fish

There have been other cases of pets saving their owners as I am sure you know. Acts that make Rabbit’s act of self preservation look piffly in comparison but I expect that the main reason everyone is so surprised is because it is rarely assumed that rabbits are that intelligent.

I had always been a huge fan of the film Watership Down when I was a kid. Even now, whenever I hear Simon and Garfunkel singing ‘Bright Eyes’ I get a little sniffly. Who could fail to be similarly warmed by the Velveteen Rabbit escaping the bonfire and becoming real? I hope I didn’t ruin the ending for anyone there.


Long live the rabbit I say, and in this case long live its lucky owners too!

Expensive Car Insurance Claims

In the history of car insurance claims, this collection of expensive car crashes begs the question, did they have car insurance?

Sexism in the Olympics?

Due to me being at work all day every day for the past few weeks without access to my beloved widescreen LCD TV, I have been watching the Olympic feeds on my computer. At the last Olympics the variety and clarity of these feeds would be nowhere near the quality now available to me from websites such as CNN the BBC or the Guardian online. I find I can watch races, interviews and commentary of the games in my lunch break right from the comfort of my desk.

Copywriters (me) spend a lot of time scouring the net for research purposes or reading online newspaper articles for up to date inspiration. Recent net surfing has uncovered an Olympic sized debate about the way that female athletes or their events are reported by the media. Simon Barnes the chief sports writer from the Times Online started it with an article about his 'crush' on athlete Yelena Ishinbayevaand and whether or not he had the right to have an ogle at her body and then write about it (along with her performance) in the sports section.

Sports writers should stick to sport and facts rather than looks and opinion. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and sport is not about looks, it is a job and it is about ability. You would not catch war reporters commenting on the attractiveness of soldiers would you?

Sports professionals have enough to worry about without wondering what journalists are going to write about their appearance. Athletes work to hone their body to perfection not to attract the opposite sex, but to achieve maximum performance in their chosen profession. It would be patronising and beside the point to include comments of a writers individual and personal feelings towards the way an athlete looks.

Many people commented that this kind of 'appreciation' of the female body would be fine if the same attention were paid to men. I disagree with this on two counts. Firstly because the same goes for men when competing in sport; ability and not looks should be the real cause for plaudits. Secondly women are all too often judged for their looks where men are not. How often do you see wrinkly older women present the news alongside dashing young men?

The judging of females on their body, youth and looks is far more ingrained in society than many people realise because they are so used to it. When comments are made about a woman's looks it reduces her to be defined by her sexual appeal rather than by her achievements. In this day and age men and especially women should be encouraged to judge themselves on their personal achievements and to only rely on their looks as a last resort.

Before I am accused of being a bitter or ugly woman with a grudge I can assure you that this is not the case. As a woman I understand that although female athletes want to be appreciated for their looks off the playing field, maybe to their boyfriend or husband or to a good looking young man on a night out with friends. They do not however, want to be examined or sexually appreciated by middle aged journalists whilst they try to do their best and be recognised for their working achievements on the field/track/pool/court.

Leave the leering to the lads-mags and the red tops. No one wants to see this kind of backward outlook coming from respected newspapers that should not patronise their readers by assuming we can't see what we like for ourselves.