Today is my first day back in the office, after 7 days spent at home. Great! You might think, but seriously, I feel like I’ve been living underneath my house for that entire period. And when I left my dude at home to look after the dogs, and whip our builder into shape, I felt elated upon leaving the house to an office with lights! carpets! paint on the walls!
All of the rooms in our house, bar the kitchen and bathroom are out of commission. There are no lights in the hallway, spare bedroom or office. There are no sockets for internet (hence my prolonged absence) or telephone. I must remember to buy an international calling-card to give my dad a ring later today. He arrived back in Canada from Trinidad on Tuesday, and no doubt has already booked a flight to London to check if I’m still alive. The dude’s mom actually sent the dude’s brother over to us on Saturday morning to check if we were still alive, as we hadn’t answered any of her calls. We had good reason. We were sleeping for the first time in 2 weeks!
When 90% of the house is out of commission, and you have a builder that works slower than a mutated snail-turtle-thing, you only have one option during the day: go outside. So I’ve spent the past 7 days outside, on our swing, which thank god is covered because London is notorious for shitloads of rain over the Easter weekend. Hence we sat, read more gossip magazines then I’ve ever read in my life, and contemplated how awful of a situation we’re in. I’ve never swept, vacuumed and dusted so much in my whole life. And when you turn around, everything is coated in dust again anyway. We change the sheets on our bed every two days. All of our possessions are in the garage, and it will be impossible to find some items again. Today, on the way to work, it rained. I do not know where my umbrella is. I am wearing green Puma’s in the office, with yellow shoelaces because my heels? They’re somwehere in the far right hand corner of the gargage, next to our Mac, which was smashed three times during the disabling of that atrocious spider-filled wardrobe. We will be buying contents insurance before we plug the poor thing back in, because I have a feeling we’ll need a new one. OH! And the spiders? They are not nearly as atrocious as the dust. Spiders? Puh! Dust? ARRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!
Nevertheless, progress has been made on the house. The spareroom is nearly complete, with the walls fully plastered, emulsion added, and paint – ivory cream – which looks really really good. Our windowsills used to be polished wood, to which we sanded that down and painted them white, as the windows themselves were white – this has completely updated the rooms from 1900 to 2009. Our bedroom is also nearly finished. We moved our bed to where the wardrobe used to be, which has added an extra quarter in space, to the room. Our windowsill has also been painted white, and all looks lovely. I will try to stick some pictures up when we finally have internet up and running again.
By Tuesday, our snail-turtle builder is supposed to have the spareroom, our bedroom, and the living room all complete so that maybe, just maybe, we can live somewhat normally again.
Next Friday, we are going to Liverpool as the dude has a giant dinner/piss-up to attend. He booked us into a really nice hotel paid for by his company, which will be luxury compared to the state of our house. The dogs are going to stay the night in the kennel, and even that will be luxury for them, compared to the current state of our house. Max is so bewildered by everything that’s happening around him, that he’s started hiding his bones, because the evil turtle-snail builder might steal them and feed them to his children.
When this is all over, we’re not moving for at least 10 years. Because I don’t know if I’ll every be able to go through this again. I can understand if you were trusting enough to leave the builders to do the work while you head off on holiday or something, but actually living in this sort of situation is pretty much the worst experience I’ve ever been in.
1 Comment
April 17, 2009 at 8:56 am
For the composition piece on my final exam (which I took tonight), we had to write about a friend, so I wrote about you. You might like the bit where I described a certain MIL.
“Chelsea n’aime pas sa belle-mere. Elle est un diablo.”
I hope I get bonus marks for that.