Tuesday April 26, 2005

Nine day fortnights ?

No I have not lost my limited mathematical ability completely. When I worked at BT and then HR Wallingford we had flexi time. In these times of stress, busy people, crowded roads etc I think flexitime should be considered by management for many reasons. I basically worked at BT from 8am until 5.30pm and got every other Friday off. That is not 'real' flexitime but a version that provides the employer with a longer working day, and the employee with twenty four extra days holiday. At HR it was more flexible and I can understand employees gasping at the abilitiy of employees only having to be during 'core hours' and being able to carry forward a deficit or credit of ten hours to the next month. You could also take 1.5 days off per month.

I cannot believe some kind of flex time is not more openly available to everyone. I think it offers great benefits and in a carefully managed environment could be made to work. It would cut down on crowded trains, roads and mean with flex desk working employers could reduce the amount of office space they need. Of course employees benefit too.

Owning a Victorian house

After owning two modern houses, when we moved to Oxford we ended up living on a road called Magdalen Road in East Oxford. I think we paid 80K GBP for it or thereabouts. This was at the height of the 1980's housing boom. The survey was reasonable and the words I read in it seemed to assure us all was well. However very soon we realised the house needed a lot of TLC. The thing about these houses is they look ok until you try and do something. Take the spare room. We decided to decorate it. First thing remove the wallpaper. Hang on the plaster comes off too. Time to replaster the room. Plaster dust gets everywhere. The window. Sash windows . Very nice to look at and I soon learned how to take them apart, strip the paintwork and rehang the sash weights on the cord. I found painting the window with Sadolin was best. This preserves the wood as it seeps into the grain and to give it another coat you just paint that on top. As this stuff is thin you don't have the problem of windows getting stuck and not opening. Of course while the window was in bits I had to board it up. When I did the front bay window for the living room sashes the boarded up window looked like we had squaters !

The central heating installation and bathroom refit were reasonably painless but the roof replacement was a real mess. I remember trying to open the loft landing hatch afterwards. It felt stuck. I gave it a good shove and a ton of slate dust landed on the carpet. We replaced all the doors with stripped pine ones which was easy.

When we did up the rear garden there was a concrete path to remove. We had no path by the side of house being a terrace so the whole lot had to be carted through the house to a skip on the road. The turf went through the house on a return leg.

All this sounds very negative but we enjoyed that house. The best room was the dining room. We installed a new fireplace with victorian tiles. It was a lovely room as the window looked out over to the nearby church. When we came to sell up and move to Twyford I think we got 75K for it. We had put a lot of initial equity into it so we were still solvent (others were not so lucky at this time) and because of its condition it sold quickly.

I think owing a house like this is a once in a lifetime experience. Only once.