Search results for:

Looks like they've changed the process a bit this year, discussion on it over on HotUKDeals which will no doubt deliver the best hints and tips on how to get lucky.

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/wimbledon-centre-court-no-3-court-tickets-from-44-booking-sale-9am-12pm-day-before-2469728

...last train being 1:30am

This is a huge plus of being on that line, perfect for those nights you decide to stay for just one more!

With parents up in Peterborough and an interest in being near(er) to the North Norfolk coast we were looking to live on the southern section of the East Coast Mainline.

St. Neots ticked a lot of boxes, but taking the cost of two season tickets (£4,800 each w/o Tube, £6,076 with) out of our take-home pay didn't make the numbers work at all - we figured we'd rather put that into a mortgage for five years or so and then look to move up as life changes. Would be much easier if we both didn't work in Westminster, admittedly!

We ended up in Dartford. Having last been renting in Charlton it's not that much further out - it's currently Zone 8 but there's talks of it coming into Zone 6 in the foreseeable future which would be a helluva bonus.

It does annoy me that there's no fast train service, but if I catch them right I can be door-to-desk in about 1hr 10mins (which is mental for a 17mi. journey, admittedly) and I've got the cycle down to around 1hr 25mins at present which I'm hoping to improve as the months go on...

Ticketmaster link is here.

Apologies for delay, been at Glastonbury for the weekend and apparently Virgin Mobile don't believe in providing reception to Somerset...

It'll be clearly sign-posted on Ticketmaster nearer the time; I'll post it on here once I see it (can't at the moment on my phone, but may be on desktop version)

Ticketmaster always has tickets for the next day's play that go up in two batches: http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/wimbledon-centre-court-no-3-court-tickets-from-50-00-booking-sale-9am-12pm-day-before-2234020

I've only been the once, managed to get Centre Court tickets for Murray's final in 2013 the night before via this route (£125ish each).

Can never go again now, of course...!

Brought some memories back, that trailer - ended up as a DNF during LEL2013 having packed at Kirton on the way home.

2017's on the bucket list. Got scores to settle!

We used Fantastic Cleaners the time before last we moved out as they had some discount deal on. The last move we did ourselves as we had a good relationship with the landlord...having said that, I'm now convinced it's worth paying £x to save the hours of effort.

Biggest thing for us, having been stung in the past, was the fact we could have a receipt in hand that proved we'd had the place professionally cleaned. The fact they were genuinely decent was an added bonus!

For our van hire we went with Emterprise, seemed reasonable compared with all the others and far cheaper than previous efforts with Zipvan (over a day).

Never managed to do a Dunwich Dynamo, life's always got in the way - would be interested if there was something organised. Can possibly convince one other too.

That guy was interviewed before the start, was going for the world record for 'carrying a household appliance' across marathon distance.

It apparently has to be over 25kg and he said it weighed 26kg which made me wonder if he was allowed to shave bits off or they had to remain factory standard.

He finished in 06:05:21!

Having re-painted three rooms earlier in the week (who knew what appeared to be baby blue and pink walls would require five coats of white before losing their hue?!), this weekend has been filled with hanging pictures and putting up shelves.

So far have got away without needing to nail/drill secondary holes anywhere...

Next task is the garden. Need to decide if it's worth attempting to re-seed a small and patchy lawn (around three by five metres) or go for a full re-turf. Any tips?

Sounds identical to the broker we used (and the cashback, Nationwide?). We could have gone alone, but figured as first time buyers it was worth spending a little bit for someone else to do the leg work if anything needed chasing or sorting - we did laugh as he told us him and his company was fee-free, 'but there's a £250 completion fee to pay'.

The re-mortgaging in two years on the other hand is apparently totally fee-free. We'll see when the time comes...

Exchanging Wednesday, completing Friday...assuming everything goes to plan.

Well everything went to plan, we were out of our flat in Charlton by 12pm and all bits were unloaded in the new place (DA1) by 3.30pm. Even had time to do an IKEA run before dropping the van back at 12pm the next day!

Waiting on bed and sofa, and the 'fun' now starts with painting and general DIYing that we'd like to get done before we consider the place ours. First mortgage payment due 1st of next month, so will have three-odd weeks of interest added onto it too. Gulp.

Yep...I've got the Note Sleeve as my day to day wallet and just picked up an Elements Phone Pocket for when I'm out on the bike (got fed up of needing to find sandwich bags if it looked likely to rain!).

Would highly recommend, have just bought from bellroy.com each time. Super fast, free delivery.

Exchanging Wednesday, completing Friday...assuming everything goes to plan. The four months since having our offer accepted has felt like a year!

Thanks all, appreciated - the darkest walls we'll be going over are baby blue and baby pink, so should hopefully not be too bad in regards to needing too many multiple coats.

White paint...is there really any need to pay for the Duluxes of the world at £39.99 for 5l, or will the 10l Leyland Trade stuff do (which are currently 2 for £22.00 at Screwfix)?

Looking at giving the walls and ceiling a freshen up before we move in to a new place, then going for a wall of colour in each wall - just want to make sure we're not throwing money away for no reason on marketing/advertising bumph.

Any recommendations?

Interesting thread. I was born in London, but my parents decided to move out of the city when I was five (and my brother three) as they didn't really fancy bringing us up here; moved to Peterborough...I came back in 2006.

Had I mortgaged myself to the eyeballs on arriving back I'd be laughing right now but hindsight, as ever, is a wonderful thing - instead I've rented in and around Zones 2-4 over the years and we're just in the process of purchasing our first house. We've ended up heading out to Dartford to find something that's both affordable/decent-sized and reasonably convenient (both of us work in Westminster).

We'd have loved to have moved nearer Cambridgeshire or Norfolk - St. Neots was on the list, and commuting time wise isn't actually that much different to where we've ended up looking, but the season ticket cost of £6,076 each put us off...not keen on blowing c.£12k of take-home salary on getting to and from work at the moment.

London's great, there's always something to do if you have the time/money to enjoy it. Unfortunately it's getting that balance right that's the difficult bit!

Justified the purchase of a Fenix 3 with the 'annoyance' of having to plug-in my 800 to upload activities to Strava and I have to say I'm very impressed to date; quite nice to have the quantified self stats of steps and sleep etc. back again...lost those after my Jawbone UP 24 decided to pack in.

The LiveTracking 'gimmick' is also pretty useful, far more so than I originally anticipated. Pizza was just coming out of the oven when I arrived home last night!

No issues with GPS signal as I've seen reported on other forums. Would recommend.

Currently in the 'waiting to exchange' queue - all our paperwork is in and in order, enquiries are back...waiting for management information pack to come in (freehold house but on a managed estate) before we can get down to signing our lives away.

Not really sure whereabouts is best to place this, but here seemed most appropriate.

A couple I met at the Edinburgh Festival last year are currently en route to New Zealand via the Americas having set out from North London at Easter.

They're blogging/podcasting their efforts on their website, which I'd recommend as worth a listen.

Strange colour for rain jackets

Quite like that green one, it's almost Bianchi celeste...

Right...starting to look seriously about getting out of the rent cycle and buying something of our own - don't need/want to be investing too much and we're not overly fussed which direction out of London it is, a simple two-bed place that means we can get in and out of Westminster without spending a silly proportion of our monies each month on mortgage/travel combined is probably the ideal for now.

Having had a look along the East Coast mainline (grew up in Cambridgeshire) it's incredible just how much the season tickets cost...£7.5k a year each for the privilege of getting to and from Peterborough?!

In and around Dartford comes up as reasonably affordable, but does mean living in and around Dartford...and the train into London Victoria isn't necessarily the quickest at c.50mins.

Any other suggestions as to places that'd be worth looking at?

I did wear a Jawbone UP24 for a while - integration with the iPhone was superb and the summary/SmartCoach pages were useful. I had it buzzing every two hours during the working day to prompt me to fill my water up again and had it warn me if I'd been idle for half an hour to get me up and out my seat. I did feel a bit more refreshed after using the 'smart sleep' alarm to wake you in the morning, but that could well be a placebo effect.

Unfortunately it borked after about six months. The retailer had no replacements in stock so I took my money back as a refund (£105) - had every intention of replacing it but never got round to it.

The Pebble Time I've since got will, in theory, be a suitable replacement but it's not there yet.

In short, for what it does the Jawbone is a superb bit of kit. It'd be nice if it had a watch display on it - I did miss that (felt weird wearing it and a watch so abandoned the watch).

An alternative would be the Fitbit Surge: https://www.fitbit.com/uk/surge