Wish List

A running list of things on our radar. In recent years we’ve been careful not to just buy things on a whim, but to plan for them and make sure we balance a purchase against what else we would like. We generally try and ‘buy for life’, as much as that’s possible to do these days - although unfortunately that almost always means buying the most expensive version, although that approach has worked well for us over the years. Everything on this list is a want not a need, which is a wonderful and very lucky place to be. Victoria and I are now in the space where we recognise that simply buying more stuff doesn’t equal happiness, and actually find it quite healthy having a list of things which we’d like, but are also managing just fine without. We’re ever conscious that even if we had all the things listed here, we’d only ever add more stuff anyway. We generally only include items here that are more than £100.

Home & Garden Improvements

• Additional Smoke Alarms. We have the right smoke alarms in out home, but would like to also cover the loft and garage. We need 1x Ei208WRF (CO), 2x Ei660iRF (loft & garage), 1x Ei168 (radio interlink). Our home is perfectly in compliance with regulations, but I think this would be a nice additional safety net. Fire scares me.
• Garden Landscaping & Paving. A 2027 project to improve our outdoor space, not going to be cheap. Possibly a DIY project.
• Water Softener. We have very hard water in Kent, it sucks, and cleaning the shower is a PITA. This would solve it but it’s expensive.
• Lounge TV Bracket. Our Sofa isn’t directly in front of the TV, I’d like a motorised bracket so we can make it so.
• Greenhouse & Raised beds. Victoria has developed green-fingers and we need a space to propagate all her wonderful plants.
• Air Conditioning. 2026 has been an absurdly hot summer. We have managed with portable units but they’re a PITA. We’d love for it to be fitted properly.

Clothes

• Dubarry Boots. I love my Dubarry’s for sailing, but don’t want to ruin them for dog walking, these would be ideal. Yes, I know I have wellies too.
• Sailing salopettes. I have some already, but as many sailors know, they’re a pain when you need a wee. These ones have a special sit-down flap. I am lazy and I get sick when down below in swell.

Kitchen

• Drinking water filter. A Doulton Filter or a reverse osmosis system. Lots of chat about microplastics and health issues, who knows if that’s true. Would be nice to have cleaner drinking water.
• Fizzy drink maker. I like fizzy water, we buy bottled which is not exactly great.
• Sage Espresso machine. It’s a lot of up-front cost for a coffee, but I despise giving Nestle money for Nespresso pods.
• Robert Welch Cutlery. We have one teaspoon in our drawer that is classy AF and it’s a small win when I find it for a yoghurt. I’ve love to have a proper set for formal meals.
• Villeroy & Boch Tableware Set. I love the depth of the Royal collection. I fully recognise that I have an obsession with a well-made table. Thankfully we already have a full suite of glassware!
• Pressure Canner. A little random, but I’d love to preserve beans and other vegetables from summer into jars. This is a thing in North America, but less so here in the UK. This one place seems to import and sell them in the UK.
• Food Processor. We want the big daddy Sage food processor. It’s £500 when on offer, which is insane but it is (hilariously) probably top of the list.
• Coravin. I enjoy nice wine and sharing it with others, however opening a 75cl bottle often creates a pressure to drink it all there and then, which I find can take some of the enjoyment away, while encouraging unnecessary drinking. Plenty of bottles sit unopened because I don’t want to risk wasting them. A Coravin is the answer to that and allows dispensing of wine using a needle which is inserted through the cork, wine in dispensed and an inert gas is injected into the space in the bottle. Bottles can be kept for a long time in this state. I love the idea of having a single small glass of quality wine without risking waste. Although I do fear it’ll encourage buying even pricier wines!

Technology

• Silent Network Switch. We have a cranky Cisco gigabit PoE switch in the garage serving the house, it’s noisy and I can just about hear it from our bedroom which is annoying when trying to sleep.
• AirPods. I lost mine in Glasgow airport and have been stubborn about replacing them. I just don’t listen to anything if I end up commuting, or pinch Victoria’s!
• Neohub Gen3 for the UFH controllers. Our extension has underfloor heating but I can’t control it from an App, this would fix that.
• NAS device for storing files and running small apps/services. I used to store all pictures in full-res on my Macbook, but the library got too big. I’d like to have a local copy of everything.
• Standing desk. Would be nice to be able to work standing up occasionally rather than being sat down all day.
• Herman Miller Aeron chair. My current desk chair isn’t doing my back any favours, an Aeron would be a proper long-term fix.
• New iPad for Charlotte. The poor soul has an iPad that doesn’t support Disney Plus but that helpfully saves from paying for a subscription.
• New Macbook. This is not a priority, but my current Macbook (An 2021 M1 Pro, 32Gb RAM) is now 5-years old. Which is quite incredible as it’s still working perfectly, but in a year or two that won’t be the case.
• UPS. When we lose grid power, and when we do it’s most often just a few seconds, it takes 10 minutes for the network to come back, which is very annoying.

Health, Fitness & Family

• Monitor for the rower/garage. I enjoy using the rower, but I would like a screen to watch something as I get bored listening to music.
• Car Seat. £150 each. Charlotte is getting too big and we’re going to need a new car seat, one where you use the actual seatbelt instead of dedicated straps. We’ll probably need to buy two so we don’t end up moving them between cars constantly.
• Laser Eye Surgery. I wear glasses but I don’t really enjoy doing so. I’d really like to have my eyes corrected so I can I can be free of them.
• A Home Sauna. I adore being in a sauna and having a good ‘ol sweat. There are no Saunas in High Halstow and I’m not driving 25 minutes and paying a gym fee to use a shared one.

Preparedness & Camping

I could write a whole piece on this topic, but our general objective is to gain independence from mains utility services and shops for a week.

• Better home battery & integrated grid switch. We’d like to upgrade our GivEnergy system for a Tesla PowerWall and gateway with capacity to manage winter better and handle power outages. Our heating and hot water is all electric, so if we have no mains power and a series of continually grey days, we’d struggle over winter.
• Portable battery & solar panels. More for camping, but a nice to have as a backup. We’re lucky that Victoria’s car can act as a portable battery and inverter and have actually used it in a power cut. For this, something like the Anker Solis range.
• Freezer for the garage. We have two freezers already, but seldom have space for a meal prep and meat, I’d like something for longer-term storage for buying in bulk.
• Water storage. This is a prep. I’d like to have ~120L of water available at home if there is a major shortage, mains water failure or other situation. 120L should cover us for about 5 days. We also have the water butts which store water suitable for toilet flushing. We generally have a few crates of bottled water but need something a bit more structured.
• Better garage storage shelving. My garage is great, but it is small and needs slightly better organisation to best utilise it.

Long-Term

• A Boat. The big one. It’s my dream to have a boat on the River Medway and to spend time sailing on it with our family. Nothing too fancy, but we’d probably aim to spend about £50k to £60k for something ready to go. We’d want some something somewhat modern, safe, suitable for light-handing, comfortable and easy to manage. I like the idea of a centre-cockpit with aft cabin, they are usually 36ft+. It’d probably a cruiser-first rather than racer-first, so some kind of mass-production Moody, Jeanneau, Beneteau, or Bavaria. We likely wouldn’t race it but it’d be nice to have a cruising sail or spinnaker. Ideally we’d buy something that’s going to be suitable for a decade or more. I’ll keep dreaming.

• A Holiday Home. I think there’s a lot of truth in the concept of Blue Health, that is the idea of being on or near water has benefits for wellbeing. We’d love one day to have a small little place on the coast. Being able to see the sea would be essential, I love the idea of watching changing weather’s impact on the water. Somewhere warm would be nice, perhaps outside of the UK. Mostly for retirement rather than now while we’re still very content with visiting and enjoying new places.

Purchased in 2026

• Shed for the back garden. Fred the Shed joined us in May 2026, we bought him from Passmores during Rochester Sweeps festival. Dad and I installed a concrete base specifically for him along the side and we put him together once he was delivered. Having garden things stored in the shed vs the garage has helped free up space there and also means that we don’t need to continually sweep the garage out of grass! We paid £340 as we got an Easter discount. Worth every penny!
• Air conditioner. We didn’t know this at the time, but it would turn out that 2026 would literally be the hottest year on record. We had some suspicion that it would get warm, but made the wise decision in May to order two portable air conditioning units. We paid £390 for a 9000 BTU and £330 for a 7000 BTU. Both have been a life-saver for the particularly hot periods and allowed us to sleep and relax much better. On certain days Charlotte would sleep in our room on the spare mattress on the floor! They are bloody noisy though and it’s really not an ideal setup. I hope for summer 2027 we can look at a more permanent solution with efficiency and noise being who key factors. Even as I type this in September there are days where we’d likely have the bedroom temperature better controlled. Expensive, but I’m glad we did it.
• Le Chameau wellies and Socks I have wanted a pair of these for a long, long time. While on a birthday trip to Hereford we stopped at Philip Morris & Son (I had never heard of this store before), my goodness it was incredible! A proper english country store with outfitters and a gun room. I don’t think I had ever seen Le Chameau on sale in an actual store and so it was hard to resist. I’m really glad we tried a few pairs on as the more expensive ones which I thought I would want, I ended up not liking and so was able to get the cheaper wellies. They are amazing. I have not had a chance to use them in anger, buying them in April, but look forward to winter this year. We paid £220, which I felt was quite reasonable.
• Summer holiday 2026.
• October holiday 2026.
• Birthday weekend away 2026
• Victoria prescription sunglasses
• Garmin body scales.
• Dumbbell set.
• Bluetooth HR monitor for rower.
• Bigger and better tent. needs two rooms, height to stand up, blackout, and an awning space. We went with:Decathlon and the Arpenaz awning.
• Beds and bedding for the tent. we went with: bed base and mattress. Absolute camping gamechanger.