Aand the work on our house has finally started! It’s felt like it’s taken a while to get going, but to be honest the insurance company have been good to deal with so far. The delay is mostly because the value of the insurance claim meant a few different people had to come and inspect it, which means arranging a convenient time for them to visit, them completing the visit, and then them filing a report before the next person can come out and so on.
Still, we have the go-ahead for our preferred contractor to do the work, so he’s made a start today after we spent yesterday moving various bits of downstairs upstairs and into the garage and various other bits to the tip. We haven’t done the half of it yet, though - we’ve just cleared the dining room area and one half of the kitchen cupboards and surfaces, but as the dining room/living room are open plan we’ll need to clear the whole shebang when it comes to be time to prepare to redecorate. I think we’ll be tripping over things upstairs for a while! You should see the amount of books we’ve evicted between us, too. I’ve been being ruthless with them for weeks now (there are still loads that I can’t part with, but I have finally managed to evict all my University anthologies except Shakespeare) and still found three carriers of ‘my’ books to go to the charity shop!
We’ve also moved the birds into our bedroom in order to keep them away from as much of the noise and dust as possible, which has meant an interestingly early morning on particularly sunny mornings, when they all get up at the crack of dawn and clamber down their cage for food. Sometimes it’s a pain to sleep lightly!
Everything, including plaster, is now in the process of being removed from one wall of the kitchen (That being the wall which has the oven and the hob on it - wooyay. The microwave and toaster are now in the boxroom and represent, with the kettle, our ability to heat food and drink for the time being. I’m just glad it’s summer…) and the reverse side of the same wall in the dining area, plus both floors need to come up and the corresponding bathroom wall also needs to be exposed. The start that’s already been made demonstrates that our kitchen must once have been a green-fest, as the lino under the existing lino appears to be the same sort of mildly drab shades as the tiles. I bet we’ll find that the sunshiney yellow paint was once a faintly industrial green, too.
Once the relevant bits of wall and floor are exposed, people will come in with some industrial dryers and we can’t get any of it put back together again until those have done their job. Then the leak under the shower needs sorting (it was stopped weeks ago, but we haven’t been able to arrange the repair - thank goodness we have a separate bath!) and downstairs can be redecorated, rebuilt and reorganised back into a liveable space again.
I’m glad we hadn’t got around to decorating downstairs already - that would have been rather annoying! While we’re in such chaos, though, we might see what money we can find to make a few improvements that it would be easiest to make while we’ve got someone already working on the house. Until then, at least I’ve managed to find a way (with cunning use of masking tape, a long network cable, and the fact that our stairs are open tread) to use t’internet in the bedroom so that I can keep the birds company amidst the impending chaos!
