Two weeks before Easter, Hubby came home and knocked down the wall between garage and conservatory with a sledgehammer.
Next weekend we have around forty friends and their small children coming for drinks and nibbles – and the living room is full of rubble.
Holding back my inner fishwife I am forced to admit (only to myself, obviously) that the fall of the wall is almost entirely my own fault.
Bored of waiting for my extension to be finished (started), I went to look at a house for sale yesterday. A very pretty (small, dark) cottage with a large (completely boxed-in) garden – and immaculate.
Now I’ve looked at immaculate houses before and, by and large, they’re not really my thing. To get the best price the vendor has completely recarpeted the house in top-quality, chocolate shag pile and fitted a spanking new kitchen which you really couldn’t justify ripping out but couldn’t live with for longer than it took you to open the front door – so you can’t buy the house.
But this one wasn’t like that. It was immaculately kitted out in my style (although I accept that to put the word immaculate and the phrase ‘my style’ in the same sentence would flummox most people who know me). I even loved the lamp shades - which I have an almost medical thing about – and which they were leaving. And the beautiful curtains. And the garden was stunning. My kind of stunning.
So the following morning I took hubby by the horns and suggested he go look at it.
His eyes rolled into the back of their sockets and his head hit his Shreddies. He peered at me through the milk in his fringe, clearly bewildered.
‘I didn’t know you wanted to move,’ said the poor man. ‘And besides – that place doesn’t fit your ‘criteria’. Surely??’
He had a point. It didn’t. My criteria are a standing joke in our family. They are the sort of requirements that are perfectly reasonable if your budget is well over a million – no neighbours within any kind of listening or spying distance of the garden, which by the way has to be south facing, masses of space and light, at least three reception rooms because I work from home, not on an estate as I have hens and camper vans and am a bit shabby so would upset all the stripey lawn set, and ideally on the sea front (even more ideally on a beautiful beach but not one that anyone else can go on, so people can’t watch me sunbathing and strangers’ dogs can’t wander into my lovely garden and eat my hens). On our modest budget though, my criteria are notoriously hard to meet. Where we live now meets all of them except the sea front bit and took ages to find.
So I understood his confusion. But then he blew it. ‘After all the plans we’ve made for the extension, all the work I’ve done....’
And there it was. The red rag that broke the camel’s back if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor.
We moved here a few summers ago. I thought the extension would be finished for the first Christmas. Then I thought it would be finished for the next Christmas. Then the next. Hubby listened quietly and patiently as I babbled and blubbed about how long it was taking and then left for work, apparently ignoring my frustrated ranting.
I was wrong, as usual. Five thirty on the dot he came home with a sledgehammer and knocked down the wall. By bedtime the extension was, well, started. I can't really complain.
And by the time he and daughter number one had spray painted daffodils and sunshine on the decorator’s curtain separating my drinks party from the garage my teeth were no longer even gritted.
I’m looking on the bright side. It will be a great ice-breaker and a great party. And by this Christmas the extension will be finished........
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