Coping when things go wrong in the home

Being parents we want to try and make the home environment as comfortable and safe as possible but just like driving a car, which needs to be MOT'd each year a house requires some maintenance as well. It's typical for things to go awry at the wrong time of year, such as just before Christmas - which is what has happened to us.

Our recently re-tiled bathroom in the eaves 

I had run the little man a bath, nothing unusual there except when John came home from work and ran up the stairs telling me water was running out through a light in the lounge - not good! We have been doing some renovation work on the house but were hoping to keep the original bath which was in all accounts in good condition and having recently re-tiled the floor in the bathroom this was not something we wanted to pull out. The next day we had the plumber come out who suspected the sealant around the bath had worn away causing the leak, although it also appears the grouting used for the wall tiles (not the ones we recently replaced) may not be suitable for a bathroom, so instead of doing a little patch up job we have decided to replace the bath altogether, as in the longterm it's better for selling the house anyway.

I would love to replace our bath with a free standing one (image)

Luckily we discovered the leak before we had made any huge purchases for Christmas and even though we were planning a fairly frugal festive holiday it's made it even more so but thankfully as we had been saving up we will be abel to manage with this big outlay in January although with a new baby on the way it's still not ideal. It made me think about what would happen if you simply could not afford these kind of emergencies and what you can do to better prepare yourself...here are few things we try to live by

1. Always put away a little bit of money for a rainy day as you never know when you may be in a pickle and having something to at least contribute towards some kind of house/car/living emergency really will help in any stressful event

2. Less is more - just because it's pay day it doesn't mean you "have" to spend your money. I always ask myself if I really need something before purchasing it - this even applies to things like groceries.

3. Live within your means - something which seems hard for people to do when there is so much temptation in the world at the moment, but we need to be realistic with ourselves as over spending will only cause stress in the future.

Another thing to consider is having something like a credit card from a reputable bank such as Santander to fall back on strictly for emergencies which is what we have - we only have the one and has only very rarely been used. Once when we were travelling and the bank put a temporary block on our cards as we used them overseas (which was annoying as we told them before we left we were going away) but the credit card came in handy. We also used it when moving into our new home to buy a much needed sofa as we had used our budget on things like re-carpeting, plastering etc.

Love this light and airy bathroom - I want (image)

Becoming parents and homeowners has really matured us in terms of responsibility and have fall back plans and contingencies and like I said the important thing is to live within your means but knowing that we do have something for those times when things go wrong is good to know.


In association with Santander