Hi everyone 👋,
🔥 What I have been doing this week
🤒 It has been a bit of a slow week in terms of output this week due to my daughter having a fever all weekend. She’s better now thankfully.
🚲 I went out on my road bike for the first time in two-years. We now live in a hilly area, so it took quite a bit more effort than I imagined. But it was great to get out in the sun and get active after so long.
🏠 I am polishing the first Grand Review which has meant revisiting the first episode again to remind myself of the context and pick out any missing information. I think I have captured the bulk of the lessons learned from the project, but my writing needs fine tuning. I don’t know if you can tell, but I am not a writer. This is my first public writing experience, and I am finding it hard to determine what a “good enough” finished piece should look like. It’s highly likely that very few people will read it though, so the pressure is off from that perspective.
📌 I have found a few more properties and added them to the map. They are getting harder to find, even though I am becoming more experienced at locating them off the smallest of details.
It looks as though there are around 170 properties if you exclude the revisit episodes. I have found about twenty of the properties now. Take a sneak peak at the early version today. And don’t forget to subscribe for any future updates.
📝 Where to begin?
✍️ Quote of the week
A very testing few days this weekend where I had to constantly remind myself of the above quite from The Chimp Paradox. The chimp is an analogy for our emotional side which can easily overpower the logical side in the heat of the moment. When getting woken a few times during the night by a screaming baby and no simple way to calm her down my emotional side was at its rawest.
In the context of building a house, the utter exhaustion from the build can really drain people and drag them into a more emotional being rather than logical. But just because the emotions are crying out there is still a choice to be made on whether to react on them.
This week I got out of the house and went for a cycle. It gave me some time to myself where I could just exert some frustration and benefit from the endorphin release after the ride. It worked quite well because the Chimp still had a way to vent and it was done in a controlled space away from home.
🕵️♂️ Property Glossary
I share definitions each week of words and terms that pop up now and then in the property world and can be confusing.
Encumbrance
Encumbrance is a term that refers to any legal or financial restriction that affects a property. For example, a mortgage, a lien, an easement, or a zoning regulation are all types of encumbrances that limit the owner’s rights or reduce the value of the property.
📖 Interesting Things I’ve Read
A Beginner’s Guide to Choosing the Best Deflator – While researching how best to index the prices used on the legacy Grand Designs episodes, I needed to understand different factors affecting different measurement types. Using the same inputs you can get a drastically different output depending on what you are adjusting for. This tutorial explains how it works on their website and gives a bit of context into the reasoning.
🔗 Links
Here are links to books and other resources that I may have mentioned above or that I think you might find useful.
Book/Article Snippet
The Chimp Paradox by Steven Peters. It’s a really informative book for trying to understand the way our brain often works. It can be quite difficult to follow beyond the basic analogy of the Chimp, Human and Computer.
Apps I Use
Readwise – I’ve been paying for Readwise since 2021 and gained access to Readwise Reader Beta in 2022 and find it extremely useful for knowledge retention and research. I pass all my email newsletters through it and whenever I get a spare few minutes I can pick up where I last left off without any friction.
If you sign up using the link you’ll get an extra month free (two in total) so you can really test out the software without it costing you a penny. They don’t advertise widely so it is down to word of mouth like this that gets the tool new users. I find it invaluable.
Monzo – Carefully budgeting my spending is fundamental to being able to save towards the build. Monzo has helped me track and itemise spending for years. I now pay for the Premium account which gives me access to extra features and things like airport lounge access, phone insurance, worldwide travel insurance so it practically pays for itself. If you join using this link we’ll both get £5 (which I’ll use towards the build!).
Focus@Will – This app has superpowers. It has the ability to allow me to switch off from a noisy home and get some work done and it seems to work for me in about 5 minutes.
Socials
I’m now on:
Twitter as @Brendan_Burr
Instagram as @MeasureTwiceBuildOnce
Pinterest as @MeasureTwiceBuildOnce
Snipd for Podcasts @MTBO
That’s it for this week, thanks for reading!
Brendan