Sig

Also find and mark the lid locations properly now, with a photo and a measurement from a fixed corner of the house. Doing that in August with a coffee is a lot nicer than doing it in February with a shovel and a problem.

Three good hours a day, every day, for a year, beats anyone's best week. Block three, bill honestly, stop measuring yourself against a number nobody hits.

Worth doing anyway on a new-to-you house: drain the tank fully once and see what comes out. Eight years on a well with any sediment at all and you may get a surprising amount of sludge, which is where a lot of the bacteria live.

For scale: I cook a similar amount and my Victorinox chef knife goes on a stone maybe six times a year. That is a couple of minutes on a 1000 grit, a few passes on a 3000 or a strop, done before the kettle boils. Between those, ceramic rod when it starts dragging on skins. The rod is not the problem, the missing sixth of the year is.

Can confirm the expensive way. Ignored a waterlogged tank for two months and replaced a pump instead of a tank.

Seconding this. I did scary sharp for about six months, then worked out I had spent more on paper than a decent combination stone would have cost.

Plain leather isn't doing much. Bare leather mostly aligns, it doesn't cut, and a wire edge that gets aligned by a strop is a wire edge that stands up nicely for a day and then falls over. Load the strop with a green compound or something around 1 micron and your after-sharpening strop actually removes the last of the burr instead of hiding it.

How do I tell the difference between a bit of swarf staining and actual discolouration?

Grinding the spine rather than the edge hadn't occurred to me and now it's obvious. Cheers.

On your specific list, the sashes are the least alarming item and the damp is the one to price properly before you commit. Sash refurbishment is well understood, unglamorous, and something a competent joiner does routinely, and you can do them one at a time over years. A damp patch on a party wall could be a failed gutter on the neighbour's side, which is cheap but political, or it could be something structural, and you want that identified rather than described as possible. Get someone independent who is not selling you a treatment to look at it.

Learning on the drawer knives nobody touches is the obvious move and I somehow had not thought of it.

Before any of the clever strategies, call your plan administrator and ask two things: whether the plan allows partial withdrawals after separation, and whether it forces a lump sum or rollover. A surprising number of plans only offer take it all or leave it alone, and if yours is one of those then the rule that lets people who leave service in or after the year they turn 55 take from that employer's plan without the extra early distribution tax is useless to you in practice. That single phone call reorders the whole decision, and almost every guide skips it.

Second this, and flatten more often than feels reasonable. A soaking stone can dish visibly in one long session on a hard knife.

Forty minutes on a 1000 without a burr means the stone is glazed, dished, or you're not on the apex. Rub it with a nagura or a bit of coarse stone until it feels grabby again before you assume it's technique.

Whatever you buy, put a simple sediment prefilter in front of it and a bypass around the whole assembly. The bypass is twenty quid of fittings and it turns a future failure from an emergency into an inconvenience.

Once a month on five soft stainless knives means you barely need anything above 1000-3000. Save the money you'd spend chasing a 6000 finish, it'll be gone off that steel within a week anyway.

The thing nobody tells beginners is that a dished stone quietly changes your angle mid-stroke, so you get a rounded bevel and blame your hands. Any time your results suddenly get inconsistent, check flatness before you rethink your technique.