At long last we managed to get rid of them. Like a divorce or other painful separations, they kept wanting to come back. The painters wanted to wedge themselves in between Christmas and New Year. They did not understand that a building programme which was meant to be ‘nine weeks max’ had stretched out from July 16th 2011 and kept right on going into 2012 and that we had been under occupation for a long six months.

Like other kinds of occupation we felt banished from our own homeland, forced to be ‘pleasant’ as well as living in a kind of permanent demolition zone. The house became invaded by dust and dirt. The long dry autumn snapped into a bitingly cold winter. Loud music from radio stations we never listened to permeated the daytime air. Holes opened the interior to draughts and chill air. We became sick. Douglas first of all became infected with the dust and developed a cough and I got eye problems. The strain was enormous.

Renovations – such a calm, simple, accepted word – hide behind them a whole anarchy of unleashed forces. A relationship – any relationship – is put under almost intolerable stress which is acutely financial and in almost every other way – sound, privacy, intimacy – threatens the very foundation of family or household life.

This is probably by way of explanation of why we have not written much about the this side of the process – till now. However now we have got the house back to ourselves – for a week anyway – and soon permanently, so it seems a good place to look back. Hopefully this will make sense of what appeared a semi-chaotic and remorseless process of sudden and jerky change for readers of this blog. Now things are – a little – calmer we can afford the long look back.

This dear readers is what we have been living through:

1. From Sunroom to Morning room

2: The Deck.

3. Master Bedroom 

4. From wash house to  garden room.

Like all renovators we can say…we are more or less happy with what we have got and probably it only by looking back we can comprehend and appreciate the scale of the changes.

Hopefully, after we have finally ejected the painters and the plumber – we can settle down to enjoy our new spaces.

PW