Highly Decorated ...?!

After the builder had gone I breathed a sigh of relief. Yes I have walls of bare plaster, yes there’s a river of concrete flowing through my new open plan spacious & gracious lounge / dining area but it’s quiet. There are no more drills, there is no more dust! So I thought we’d have a break. The decorator claimed he was really busy, couldn’t get to me till November so I thought oh OK let’s get all the furniture back in place, get my cleaner in for 5 hours & breathe a dust free mouthful for once & see if I can reclaim my house.

Then – the phone rang. The decorator could do me a favour. Well I think it’s a favour. He has “found” 2 weeks free starting right now, to wallpaper the living room, completely re-do the new dining area (paint, put new skirting in, skim ceiling, new coving and lay a new floor) and repaint the kitchen. Hubby looked excited so how could I say no? So I am back upstairs, working in our bedroom as all my furniture is still in a huge pile covered with dusty blankets in the conservatory. Upside I guess is the KC is now stuck to my side like glue…. In fact she’s here now snoozing as I type. It will all be worth it …. It WILL!!

Scaredy Cat

The KC really is a wuss. She has been hiding in quiet corners of the garden for the past 3 days (frequently searching for dry spots!), as the builders have come in & out. Lovely as these blokes are all the KC sees are strangers. And boy does she hate strangers! When the decorator was here recently, the first day or 2 she wouldn’t go near him – then she got used to him & realised he was not a danger & was fine. However as we have had a parade of builders, electricians, plumbers & now plasterers, she hasn’t had a chance to get used to anyone & so at about 10.30AM daily (her snooze time) she starts to pace the patio & make that pathetic high pitched meee – eeewww noise as she eyeballs the strangers preventing her easy access to her bed. This ever increasing noise then leads to me stopping doing whatever I am doing & going into the garden & picking her up & carrying her past the nasty men, (getting clawed in the process when one of them foolishly moves or makes a noise scaring the pants off her) and depositing her on the stairs from whence she legs it up to the safety & relative peace of a bed & snuggles down for a good sleep.

And after about 3 hours, a little black nose will poke through the banisters, looking for a perfect getaway moment & typically not finding one the mewing will start again & I will yet again stop what I am doing & carry her out to the garden. How right Rush Limbaugh was when he said 'Dogs have masters. Cats have only staff.'

The plagues of building…?

And I thought the worst was going to be biblical dust. Oh no. No no no.  We have had the joys of finding concrete reinforced walls with metal spikes running through where there should be a simple cavity wall, and today has been quite a different kind of plague day, today has been about the biblical flooding. There we were almost on schedule (only 3 hours ‘over’ apparently cos of the bomb proof wall) when, clearly in a moment of madness, the nice builder forgot he was in a kitchen and drilled straight through a water pipe – a high pressure water pipe. Oh it was fun. Fun fair style sprays, and of course the pipe was buried deep in the a wall. As this is the house of horrors there are 3 stopcocks so much fun was had running about trying to remember where they all where for when the emergency plumber arrived. A  couple of hours later, when all the fun died down I decided to have a bit of a clear up. And as I was mopping the kitchen floor, suddenly a strange electronic persistent tune came from the vicinity of the fridge. Cripes that’s odd I thought. After half an hour of fruitless search - the tune was waxing & waning - I questioned my sanity & called a neighbour – who put me out of my misery. The endless tune was coming from a “magic” ping pong ball stuck under the fridge. It played the little tune when the metal contacts were connected – and as it was sat in inches of water guess what happened…? So as my sanity & patience are now stretched quite a long way, hubby rushing home with fish & chips & vino. Gotta love my hubby.

The Wall of Love

Oh dear. I can’t add up. Actually that’s not totally right, I can – if I am given the right things to add. The builder should’ve started knocking down walls yesterday. Should’ve. Didn’t though. What he did do was pop ‘round to clarify the order of works & exactly what he was going to do & thank goodness he did. Appears he missed off (therefore so did I) a substantial amount (think ~£3K) which was the cost to take a fairly contentious wall down. Contentious in that we had been dithering & changing our minds & wondering if we were doing the right thing & worrying about practicalities (it was holding the house up basically & as such required a steel to be popped in) & within a calculators ping our decision had been made. That wall rocks! We “heart” that wall. How could we live without that wall? That wall is the very best wall in the house. So it stays. So now we are losing only one wall & gaining 2. It needs to be said here that the reason I am subjecting myself & the KC to these horrors is that our house appears to have been built for a Brian Rix farce – every room downstairs has 2 or 3 doorways or openings into it! So we are “consolidating” and turning 3 undefined spaces into 2 very clearly defined rooms. And it will look fab. Honest (she says watching dust sheets go down, teas being drunk & hammers & chisels coming out) Oh and I haven’t seen the KC for dust … ah yes, dust ….!

A Handful of Dust

I am about to rant. We have some new-ish lovely neighbours who have taken a bit of a wreck & are turning it into a truly lovely home. Fair enough you think. However wreck to home inevitably involves building work. And building work means lots of banging & hammering & it would seem hourly angle grinding.

Now the noise of the angle grinding I can deal with. Well certainly given the choice I would take the noise of the angle grinder over the unbelievable quantities of dust created. All day, virtually every, day the whirr of the angle grinder starts followed by biblical proportions of dust.

Very thick, very orange dust. Floating, as I type, in thick opaque clouds across my field of vision. It’s like fog. Unbelievable. I am at a loss for words as I cannot believe my neighbours (who in reality are actually very lovely & generally very conscious of the disturbance they are causing) have no idea of the sheer volume of vile dust they are creating but more importantly sharing! Are they really that totally unaware? Why oh why can’t they just wet the brick? Or spray some water as they are angle grinding? Does it honestly require a PhD in common sense to do that? Does it??

I despair that my garden and my freshly painted bedrooms are all now coated in a fine layer of bloody orange brick DUST!  I foolishly had the odd window open as it’s a warm day. My garden umbrella is no longer green it is DUST coloured.The KC used to be black & white. She’s now DUST coloured.

The noise? Bah who cares, turn the radio up, wear earplugs .... but mouthfuls, clouds, plague proportions of dust ... thank goodness I have no washing out or it would be ... guess what? Yes, DUST coloured. Cough, cough, sorry, very dry throat, could there be DUST in the air??