Hey friends,

The bubs has suddenly developed some sort of separation anxiety so we're writing this one together. Well, he's on my knee and I'm tapping away with one finger ☝️.

👷 Projects

The fence is now complete, at long last, and while it's not as fancy as the one on the other side, it looks decent enough with these panels from Wickes. By grabbing the link for that I've just seen the price has risen 12.5% (£24 to £27) per panel since I bought the 4 panels I needed last week. Inflation is really kicking in. I might have a helping hand for that later though.

For the stumps I hired this monster of a machine for £148 for 24 hours, including delivery and collection which I thought was okay though one of you emailed me saying you'd paid £100 cash to hire a guy + stump grinder to do a similar job. I seem to come across this a lot and wonder if it's the area I live in, my lack of connections in the trades or they size me up and take me for a mug. Maybe all three.

I've decided on a new money rule (you know I like 'em): buy any tool you can store, don't hire because yet again there were issues. The first day the thing was incredibly difficult to start and had to go back - turned out it was the spark plug 🙄. The whole debacle reminded me of the nail gun I hired last year, I'm very glad to have my own now but machines like this do require hiring. Second day went better and I managed to get through all the stumps and take them down 20-30cm below ground level. It was a hard day's work.

Initially I thought the blade might be missing but these hardened protrusions eat away at the stumps nicely.

The most satisfying thing about finishing was I could get the spray paint out and mark out a potential garden room outline. This is 6m x 3.5m but I reckon I'll take out the first little tree on the left and go to 7m and reduce the width to 3.3m. That way I can use 3.6m roof joists and get 15cm overhang each side without wastage. I'll do a full 3D plan over winter.

The garden's looking pretty big now and we've been discussing having our wedding here. This appeals to me as it's low cost and I prefer keeping it a small affair. So as long as Abi's happy, I think it might work. With the garden, I've been in maintenance mode since we've moved in as DIY is taking precedence but the weeds are growing so I see it as a good opportunity to hire a gardener to make it look pretty again which we could enjoy a lot longer than cut flowers at a venue. I need to be careful not to throw too much logic at this one though!

Side note. Amongst nearly all my friends they've done: house then kid then wedding, whereas my parents' generation seemed to go house - wedding - kids and I'm sure before that it went wedding - house - kids. Of course all of it happens later now too.

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Inside I haven't got very far but have managed to get the floorboards up. Here's my assessment:

• Tongue & groove with screws - fine
• No tongue & groove with nails - also fine
• Tongue and groove with nails - bloody nightmare.

No matter what I tried there was no way to lift them without breaking the floorboards, unless I'm missing something?

So I resorted to using the multi-tool to cut through the tongues...

...and got one of these pallet buster lever things which has been on my list for ages.

One idea I had for the garden room was to use pallet wood on the interior walls for which this tool would come in very handy.

This is where I'm up to. The breathable membrane will hold the Rockwool insulation in place and allow moisture out to the ventilated void underneath. Hopefully by next week I'll have a finished floor and be back in my office 🤞.

Oh and I bought a hammer tacker which beats the hell out of a stapler!

Notice the complete lack of consistent joist spacing. WTH?

The DeWalt tools have had a good workout now and I absolutely love them. They've really transformed the DIY experience and I'd highly recommend them or similar. I don't really have anything technical to say about them but the three-speed setting on the impact driver really gets rid of the need to have an electric screwdriver. All my screwing needs are now catered for. That's a weird sentence.

💰 Wickes Trade Discount

Right, the bubs is in bed so my hands are free again.

Today I managed to wrangle a trade discount at Wickes named TradePro which gets you 10% off everything. Wickes isn't my favourite for timber or sheet material but it's good for laminate flooring, fence panels, posts and Rockwool insulation amongst other things.

The discount is reserved for tradesmen and requires two forms of proof. If you do it online these are the options but there are more if you go in store:

They let me get away with just one, my website, which matches my name and a brief glance led them to believe I build garden rooms 👀.

Looking at the list though, I think anyone could whip up a business card, letterhead or facebook page and get the discount forevermore. Worth a shot I reckon so I thought I'd let you know.

If you're wondering whether I had any moral dilemma over this - no I didn't, which is interesting in itself because we all have a slightly different set of morals which dictate how we see the world, each other and even the way we vote. I get to see it a lot through the emails I receive; some really get themselves in a twist about keeping to permitted development height limits and others couldn't care less. Should rules be abided by or are they there to be bent/broken? Perhaps a good future topic worth investigating.

🎥 Video

Next video of the studio/office is out. It's a simple one where I run an ethernet cable from the other side of the house, mostly running under the carpet but I've now moved it to be under the floorboards in the office and will move the rest of it when I insulate the rest of the ground floor. Tech stuff isn't my forte so no doubt the comments will be more useful than the video.

This one has our cat in it shaking his paw which I taught him over the first lockdown. Sorry, I did say I wouldn't mention it 😿.

🧾 The Laffer Curve

I've written a long piece on how well I think we've handled covid in this country but despite this newsletter being my safe space to say what I want, it probably strays mildly into the political which is best avoided. There was some interesting economics in it though so I thought I'd pick up on stamp duty land tax (SDLT) and go off on one on that instead 👌.

Last week, we did some quick maths to look at the cost of moving home as well as the opportunity cost of not investing, but for convenience left out stamp duty land tax. SDLT is in my opinion one of the worst taxes we have because it stops people from moving home:

• Older folks stay put in larger houses than they need or want rather than freeing them up for younger families.
• People extend their homes rather than moving to a larger home resulting in fewer smaller homes for first steppers.
• We aren't as mobile as we otherwise would be and tend to look for jobs around where we live rather than consider moving to another part of the country (Here's hoping remote working helps with this).

So by my estimations one of the cleverest moves the government made during the pandemic was to reduce SDLT because of the reasons above and it also helped create a property boom. Many people will decry this point because the higher home prices that came about off the back of it (partly anyway) put home ownership further out of reach of many, but I don't think the intention was to help them, first time buyers were already exempt from stamp duty, it was to create a boom.

If you want to stimulate the economy, the property market isn’t a bad place to start. More movers means more action for estate agents, surveyors, conveyancers, brokers, lenders, van hire, movers and key cutters. Once in, there’s a boom in paint and furniture sales and then the tradesmen get their fill of the action alongside architects and structural engineers. Builders merchants start booming too and all this money then starts to spread into other areas and the velocity of money in the whole economy increases. Furthermore, those who stay put can pull more money out from their house due to its increased value and start spending that too.

So why is stamp duty going back up? To bring in higher tax revenue of course...except it might not.

If you raise tax rates, it discourages people from the doing the thing that's being taxed. Possibly a good thing for booze, cigarettes, sugar and petrol but not good for positive things like starting businesses or moving home. If less people do the thing, tax revenue can actually go down rather than up, despite the tax rate being higher.

This is a point that I've never heard made in political debates which always degrade into simple one liners which they think will go down well with the public. I'd like to see ideology taken out of the equation so rather than say 'tax the rich' or 'low taxes for all', instead say 'we'll play with tax rates to find the long term balance which provides the most tax revenue. This will result in both a strong economy and more funds for public services'. Yeh, it's probably too much to ask. I guess none of us can say for sure at what tax rate T* on the graph above will give us that. Labour seem to think it's higher than the Conservatives.

Back to SDLT, since it discourages a good thing (moving) I'd argue that it should be lower than it is, or will be when the reduction ends. If more people move, the amount of tax revenue could well go up even if the rate is lower AND if there's more demand created which leads to higher house prices then that will create more tax revenue as well - though I'd argue that the tax bands should go up with house prices.

As for the property boom, obviously I've only focused on one thing here but there are plenty of other things that are happening and could happen to carry on the boom for the next few years, as laid out in my first newsletter:

• Interest rates staying low
• Wage inflation
• Help to Buy type schemes
• Shared ownership
• Increasing multiples of income (or the 5.5 X which is only open to a % of mortgage borrowers could be increased)
• Increasing the length of mortgages which makes monthly payments more affordable (35 and 40 years now available)
• Lower deposits (5% is back)
• More money printing
• Higher immigration

Anyway, of course it's easy for me to moan about stamp duty. If it were removed entirely another form of property tax would likely need to take its place such as in the US where you have to hand over a % of your home's value each year which can have the result of forcing poorer people who bought their homes years ago out of their neighbourhoods as they can no longer afford the taxes. Our council tax equivalent is very cheap by comparison. There's no silver bullet.

👋

Hit "reply" if you've got any comments on this week's newsletter – otherwise I'll see you next time. Have an epic week :)

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