The last time I wrote one of these, I said I was sticking with "recently" because "Every 6 Weeks Note" doesn't really work. Neither does "Every 6 Months Note", because that's pretty much what it worked out to be. I remain in awe of people who have the self-discipline to turn out posts on a weekly basis. Clearly I don't.

Things have been... busy. I said that last time, as well.

A significant chunk of the last 6 months have been taken up with decorating, fitting a kitchen, and generally changing things in a house where the previous occupants had lived for 50 years. Fortunately they'd taken a money-time-and-effort-are-no-objects approach when it came to maintenance, so the house has so far a) not tried to kill us and b) not revealed any nasty suprises when things got moved, opened up, or otherwise interfered with. I've been a little paranoid about committing a statement like that to text in case it offended the Gods Of Construction and the roof immediately fell off, but after 6 months it feels like a decent time for things to have crawled out of the woodwork and so far nothing significant has.

An old building has turned out to be a lot more energy-efficient than I expected There are a lot of scare stories about how living in an Altbau means setting fire to € bank notes, so I was anticipating that there would be a significant negative difference compared to a 1970s structure. There is, but it's in the opposite direction than I expected. Although this house was built in 1936, it significantly out-performs the one we lived in which was built in 1976.

For starters, the walls are cavity-insulated with PU granules and I've added another 60cm of insulation in the roof space. The windows are original Doppelkastenfenstern, but because they've been well-maintained over the last 90 years, their performance isn't that much worse than modern UPVC units. And although it's obviously not great from a carbon emissions standpoint, the oil heating system is coupled with enormous cast-iron radiators that are significantly more powerful than they need to be.

We're burning a lot less oil than the equivalent volumes of gas, so despite being "dirtier", running an oil system has actually reduced our net emissions. I filled up the tanks with 2000 litres of what’s basically pink-dyed diesel at the start of the winter, and at current consumption rates that’s going to last the better part of two years.

New electrical installations are the perfect excuse to try to automate things, so much of the house is now wired into Home Assistant. I can now marvel at our electricity, water and oil consumption in real time, and I have data at my fingertips to answer urgent and important questions like "how hot is it up in the roof space right now?" I haven’t quite got to the stage of rooms lighting up automatically when you walk into them, or shutters that respond to sun levels, but it is useful to be able to see how long the washing machine has to run without descending all the way into the cellar. First world problems, indeed.

What made the renovation work a great deal more manageable - actually, make that at all manageable - was that I wasn't working at the same time. Not having a full-time job wouldn't have been something I would have chosen to do when we started the house moving process, but actually it paid off in terms of having the time and energy to get the big disruptive jobs done.

I didn't really appreciate at the time just how tired I was, having spent the last 10 years working at warp speed in the startup world. I've had more-or-less an entire year to step back from the code face and do physical stuff for a change. That’s hard, and it’s cured me of any lingering idea I might have had of throwing over software in favour of bricklaying or carpentry or something, but the difference was worth it.

Having the financial resources to do this was a life-changer. Years ago, someone told me about the concept of the "fuck you" budget - having enough resources stashed away that it's possible to eject when things get too bad (or just ~write a cheque~ make a bank transfer if something drastic happens.) I ended up with this by accident than savvy investing, but it's meant that I could afford to just punt the question of the next job into the future without worry. That was a luxury beyond compare.

Nice as it would be, I'm not yet at the stage where I can actually retire, so there came the point when I did have to start thinking about the next thing. This is where the "fuck you" budget paid off again, because I could afford to look at opportunities with a lot less pressure that if I was in a position of needing a salary again straight away. Thankfully the Berlin tech market turned out not to be quite as recessionary as the alarming headlines would have you believe, so I did have the luxury of choice when it came to the next job. Of which, more later...