u/InvestigatorSoft3606

We live in our forever family home (or so i thought!) The only thing I'd like to have different is to have more land. We are in a rural location and have an acre - but we would in an ideal world like more, and some proper outbuildings. In all reality we wont move until we retire, but I like to look at rightmove for the sheer interest.

Last week a property popped up near to where we live. An stunning old stone built farmhouse with barns & workshops on 15 acres. Asking price about 100k less than the value of our house. Literally stopped us in our tracks and we thought this was actually tempting enough to go and view.

On looking at the location a bit closer and a recce on foot we realised it is within a hundred metres of a dog boarding kennels. We know the area well, and know that there can be pretty constant barking from dozens of dogs that goes on for hours on end most days. In fact on a quiet day we can hear them from our house 1/2 a mile away. That was a deal breaker for us so we arent going to look at it.

Would you be the same?

I've rarely regretted taking on any job DIY style, but i have one decision / mistake that I regret and I cant fix it.

My place is a bungalow that covers quite a wide area, has the bedrooms/ bathrooms at one end and the incoming services (and the kitchen) at the other end. and as a result the length of pipes between the boiler and the bathrooms is quite long.

When i moved in the hot water system also had a circulation pump so that you got instant hot water at the bathroom taps. This was great from the perspective of getting hot water, but the heat losses in the pipework were so big that the hot water storage cylinder would only retain heat for a couple of hours at best, so it was costing us a lot of money to heat the water over and over again even if we didn't use it.

So when I did a big renovation of our kitchen/diner I removed the recirculating pipework and the pump.

Due to the nature of the renovations, I wont ever be able to reinstate the recirculating pipe.

I should have put some effort into really carefully insulating the hot water pipework, and retained the pipes - even if I left the pump switched off..

I regularly cut my neighbours grass (a 2 acre meadow that adjoins our garden)

I began because my neighbours are/were a very elderly couple (in their 90s) and could no longer physically do it themselves and we would help them with lots of other small jobs around the house too.

One (more selfish) reason I also started doing it is because they have an awesome mini-tractor to do the job and I wanted to have a go on it! The old man who lived there showed me how to operate it, let me know all its quirks, since then I have fixed it up, repaired and maintained it for them the past few years. It was in pretty bad condition, but now completely usable and quite valuable.

However last year the old man died, and Christmas time his wife became too frail to look after herself so she has moved out and into her daughters home.

My neighbours children (actually in their late 50s/ early 60s!) have hired cleaners and gardeners to maintain the house and the more manicured bits of garden, but nobody to keep their meadow in check. I wasn't sure what they would be doing about it, but they eventually asked me to mow it as it was getting out of control.

I said yes without hesitation - as that's what id been doing for years - but I found that when I actually did the job - it no longer feels like i'm doing my elderly neighbour a favour, It feels like im doing free labour for people I don't really know. I didn't get the warm fuzzy feelings, I felt a bit used - but there is obviously an expectation on their side that I will just carry on doing it.

So I tried to make it more appealing (on my side) by suggesting some ways they could pay me back for doing it without it really costing them anything. - My neighbour had numerous broken ride on mowers in his barn, I suggested Id keep mowing in exchange for them selling me one of the mowers so I could fix it up as a project - not giving for free - but selling at a fair price.

Neighbours kid said no (which is fine), but what really did annoy me , is they suggested I could still fix up one of the broken mowers as a project and get it going so I could enjoy my hobby of fixing things - but they wouldn't sell it to me, instead they would give it to their son for him to use. Then everyone wins - I get to tinker with mechanical things - they get a functioning mower! And I'm still welcome to tinker with the tractor any time I want as long as i cut the grass of the meadow.

At this point, I've decided that I'm not going to help them anymore. They'll have to hire someone to do it.