Yeah, but the thing I buy I really enjoy.
More than I would have if I’d have mucked about taking my time to get there with stuff that just wasn’t quite it.
Not sure you get my point. I don’t want stuff, I want the stuff I want.
I do get your point Steve and I can see where you’re coming from. A lot of the stuff I really want I won’t be able to afford in a reasonable / acceptable (for me that is < 10 years’ish) timescale. I don’t covet anything enough to wait longer than that, so I’m happy to enjoy stuff that I like and can afford sooner.
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The good news is we are all different. I tend to set my mind on something very quickly and it’s usually pushing my limits.
Then I do a lot of thinking and looking. And tend to end up back at plan A.
Maybe I need to be a little more open to surprises, and the journey, like Paul mentioned.
Not at all. If you really covet particular things, go for it. I just don’t.
I’ve been doing this for a while. I have no intention of compromising, however in person the Patek didn’t speak to me, which was the point of going to see it.
Although the price maths does serve to put things into perspective.
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We bought a house like that once. We’ve been reminded (expensively) every so often why we spent all that time looking at others and saying “Yeah, this one doesn’t have Problem X. or Y, or Z” but in the end we came back to the one with all the flaws. On balance I reckon it was the right call. I fear it’s about to be expensive again though
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My late Grandmothers house has subsidence. I’ve been considering using this company:
As some of you know I am very impulsive!
It’s just how peoples’ brains work.
As for watches etc. I can’t buy anything that doesn’t absolutely get me or the doubt will niggle for infinity. Usually, my gut gets that bit “right” in the first minute of looking.
I make a decision then spend time checking it. Others spend time checking and then make a decision.
They’ll be professional and will issue a guarantee (likely insurance-backed) I imagine. I don’t know much about underpinning though so to tell whether an injected ‘grout’ solution would work here I’d need to get experienced advice.
The problem is that the Victorian footings only go down less than half a metre and only spread to less than 600mm outside to inside. Worst of all, like the whole of the rest of the house, they’re made of poor quality local bricks. As far as the ground goes, there’s generally more than a metre of soil (with quite a bit of clay in it) sitting on top of deep ‘Harwell Greensand’. The latter is not at all like sand. You really can’t touch it with a spade - you need a pick. But it is still technically a clay, so it sinks and heaves with the rain. As far as building stability goes, the best you can do is dig down to the Greensand then pour a decent concrete footing and build up from that. That’s what traditional underpinners would do. I fear the grouting wouldn’t reach down that far, but I haven’t spoken to any grouters. (It’s an entirely different situation, I realise, but grouting was the solution Network Rail were trying on the embankment north of Culham when all that trouble with the Nuneham Viaduct bit them.)
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Up at 6, second bathroom coat done by 8. Unboxed new TV and assembled stand. Weekly food shop done.
Out on bike this sfternoon. Currently sat in sun with a coffee having beat my best time for one of my usual stretches.
Looking forward to nice food later with my homies while we watch something on the new telly (LG 48” OLED).
Beer may be taken.
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Feel your pain, we have a fair bit of similar going-on, likely considerably worsened by the constant 60mph HGVs - my solution will be flexible filler + hoping that the sweet embrace of death has me before the house collapses, after which it becomes someone else’s problem…
This has been a long-running problem (nearer 20 years than 10, I think) and there are lots and lots of factors. As well as the crappy footings and the collapse of the local weather into rainy season/dry season mode, someone widened all the original windows (perhaps just after WW2 ?) thereby concentrating the load paths. Then someone else (late 1960’s) put a ground-floor rearward extension on half the width of the house and ‘knocked the living room through’ into it. The load above that large opening was taken by a substantial steel, one end of which sits on a smallish masonry jamb in the centre of the rear wall. And to cap it all there’s a tree not far from the house’s SW corner which is getting out of hand. It’s also possible that the house’s roof was originally slate (most of the street is) but this was converted, a long, long time ago, to tile and, more recently, to more dense modern tile, which is heavier, on the rear.
Long story short: if you make a list of the things which might overload masonry then I’ve got pretty much all of ‘em. Not the traffic though.
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Similar problems, similar issues - I can pretty much tick the same list off 
The overriding one here is the fact it was built ca. 1760 as a bog standard cut’n’paste two-storey ‘dolls house’. By 1860 the farm was thriving (ironically, probably due to the arrival of the railway nearby), so they decided to enlarge. Very similar to you - with a more-than-double-the-footprint extension on the back - but also the killer-blow: another entire floor lumped on top of the dolls-house. Absolute madness when the footings were already inadequate and the brick substandard! No structural reinforcements were made anywhere, though there are a couple of blacksmith-style thru-ties, probably from the early settling in the C19th.
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PS. Kind of ironic that you’re on the mid-Cretaceous UGS while up here it’s us that’s on the Oxford Clay!
UGS (~Harwell GS) is somewhat variable in facies across its outcrop, but most places it’s a marly glauconitic sandstone, so would normally be fairly free-draining and good to build on. Exceptions are slopes where the underlying Gault causes spring-lines and shear/slippage/landslides! 
Not going on as many rides as expected.
If you go 500m north from me then the ground level will have dropped 15-20m and you’ll be pretty much on the Thames valley floor. It feels very much like clay there, and quite a lot like the river after a few weeks of wet weather. It’s not so obvious from the StreetView camera car
but from further away you can see that the new ‘Willowbrook’ (clue in the name) development’s buildings are sitting on subtle earth plinths perhaps a metre or so above the original ground level which is where those pre-development mature trees are. That might be a very good idea …
A few km south of me is the first shelf of the chalk downland. The ground there rises 50-60m higher than here, quite suddenly and steeply. Harwell village is at the bottom of the slope and was once famous for its orchards. The local greensand’s free-draining qualities were supposed to suit the trees.
It was the building inspector here in the late 90’s who described the greensand to me in terms of clay. Having dug quite a bit of it when I put the garage footings in I can confirm that it’s greenish, mostly quite easy to break up once it’s on the spoil heap (you couldn’t call it a rock) but with layers in it, maybe ~10cm thick, which were a good deal tougher and which you absolutely couldn’t snap by hand.
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Jaysus, I wish you were my geography/ history/ anything teacher at school. I may have become SOMETHING instead of just being a wasting cunt 
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Cheers, but never fret the direction your life took - we have a hand on the tiller but wind and tide decide where we’re going…
And I acquired a bunch of random knowledge and got lucky with it, yet - in the end - I still managed to snatch failure from the jaws of success. More than once. 
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Yeah, TBF soil and subsoil play the biggest part - here it’s ~2m of loamy silt before you hit bedrock (‘bedclay’), which is fortunate, because we get little in the way of shrinkage compared to how it might be…
Where you are could be a similar depth or more of soil/subsoil, and that could well be quite different to the underlying UGS as it’s likely an alluvial deposit dominated by clay and fine silt (at a guess).