When it comes to DIY planning, Chris is the expert in our little team. I am an over-optimistic DIYer. I look at jobs that take weeks and think; ‘oh yeah, that’ll be done in a few hours’. One of the reasons for this is that I forget that jobs are like Russian dolls. Open up one job and there’s another looking up at you from inside, and so on and so on.

Today’s job within a job involved 5 hours of driving in a rental van to collect a load of scaffolding and roof batons.

The scaffolding is going to be a key part of replacing the roof, and will also help us during window installation. You can rent scaffolding but we decided to buy it instead. We were lucky to find a set going for £750, around a third less than new, on Facebook Marketplace. While the £750 outlay for the scaffolding might seem expensive, renting scaffolding can cost £500 a week, and we knew we needed it for longer. The hope is that once we are done, we can sell it on for a similar price as it cost, saving us wasted money.

While the scaffold collection was the original reason for the van hire, we looked down our DIY list to see what else we needed to buy that would be difficult to pick up in our cars. Roofing batons are too long for easy transportation, so we decided to collect those at the same time.

Again a saving could be made by buying from a small two-man company that buys split packs of wood in big mixed pallets and separates out and repackages them to sell on. At £210 for seventy batons, these were around half the usual price.

So while it might have been an expensive day we knew we were saving ourselves a good amount in the long run.

We were lucky that the two sellers were happy to give us a hand loading up the van on collection, which always makes things a little easier. Unloading at the house was a different matter. Scaffolding is heavy and awkward at the best of times, but more so when struggling up in evening steps, through overgrown vegetation, in the surprising heat of an early May day.

I am not an unfit person, and I feel pretty physically competent when needing to carry out manual labour, but one of my weak points is my arm strength. By the end of it my arm muscles had turned to jelly, while Chris was sweating buckets. Physiologically, the worst thing is that we know we’re just going to have to move it all again when it goes up. Still, at least it was cheap – after all, blood, sweat and tears are free.