Hiccup

Slight hiccups in the moving.

*the builders are still here doing the utility room and finishing off the arches. When I say "builders", I mean builders, decorators, plumbers and electricians.
(Irritation factor, 0. Surprisingly.)
Actually they are quite handy to have around. Company you know. Other people have damp, mice, a labrador or a cyberspace lover. I have builders. I do, however, worry that they might judge my housekeeping skills which are negligible or that they might report me to social services for child cruelty.

*most sentences now begin with the words: "Have you seen...".
(Irritation factor, 7)
We are still awash with boxes and black plastic sacks we cannot hide in the loft because the plumber has not finished working in it. My London diva girlfriend will visit next week with her family. She will look pointedly at the chaos; I have nowhere to hide it before she arrives. I am contemplating asking each of the builders to carry a black plastic sack up their teeshirts during her visit. She will think them fat but she will think me tidier than she would otherwise. Possibly they could each take a box out to the arches to sit upon while they drink their tea.

*the four-year-old is down with ongoing stomach migraine which leaves him with a permanent stomach ache and insanely grumpy. Grumpier even than his mother. Yesterday morning watching Scooby Doo in the living room, he threw up all over the new beige, textured three seater sofa we had just got out of its plastic wrapping. I had not even sat down on it unwrapped. Luckily, we had paid an extra £120 to get it fabric protected. Money well spent. I think they should use a vomiting child in their advertising. He also threw up over a new wickerwork chair. Yuk. And the new oaked floor. Fair enough. My best friend from school is a business tycoon in the West Midlands. She is everything I am not: optimistic, positive, dynamic, efficient, organised, good with numbers, sporty, child-free. She did her own multi-million pound management buyout and runs a company that makes car cleaning products. She visits. Presumabily when she thinks my house smells bad, she delves in her car boot and pulls out large plastic bottles of bright blue liquids. She says: "I think you should use this."
(Irritation factor, 0)

*I lost my internet connection.
(Irritation factor, 8)

*the children's behaviour. I know I am supposed to do lots of positive reinforcement but it is just not enough. My boys never, ever, ever do as they are told the first time of telling. Ever. I know we have just moved. I know that is disruptive to a small, sensitive child. But they didn't do it before either. Buying a new kitchen carpet for the rented house is costing me more than £400 because they dyed it pink. I had thought it was an accident. It emerged their father told them to stop doing it and they ignored him. He went upstairs and left them to it.I tell them to do something, or to stop doing something; the big one looks at the little one; they carry on. Sometimes, the little one will look at the big one and carry on. They are in league. I swear to God. They have drawn up some midnight demon pact signed in boy spit and toad piddle which involves never losing face infront of each other by doing as Mummy says the first time.
(Irritation factor, 10)

*my mother fell.
“I’ll just give the carpet a vaccuum.” Trip and tumble. Crash and bang. Onto the fake coaled fire and the spiked metal grate. At least, the fire was not on. “Ooops” and “Ow”. Tears and “Shouldn’t haves.” Old lady preoccupations and old lady consequences. Vaccuuming a carpet she cannot see. To pick up dust of no consequence to anyone but her, she tripped over the wire. Her arm grazed by the spikes and bruised by the tumbled out coals, she lay there a while. The white marble hearth like a gravestone beside her. That is what old ladies do. The etiquette of an aged person’s fall. Lie there and play dead. Lie there and wish you were young again. Lie there and wait for Christmas to come or someone to walk through the door to pick you up and dust you down. Not onto the carpet though. It is important to keep your carpet clean at all times. My father was out shopping. She remembered, flat against the burgundy and woolen twist. She had turned the key, click, in the back door lock. You can never be too careful. Always lock your door to keep wolves and bad men out. You do not want wolves in the kitchen, they make such a mess. Blood and crumbs everywhere.

Minutes passed, the shining gilt and glass carriage clock made tick tock turns around the garden. Slowly, she levered herself up to grasp the handy sofa arm, struggled upright and wobbled to the door to turn the key. A blessing the sofa was so close to her; pulled away as it was from the walls, for a better and more thorough clean right up, knock, against the glossed and skirting boards. It goes to show you should never cut corners when cleaning. Without the sofa there, she would never have got to her slippered feet.

She wobbled back to find the phone and speedy dialled a number for a neighbour. Shame she had put in the number wrong. Instead, she rang an aged brother, miles away, who said: “Put down the phone and try again.” She tried again. No joy. She really must be more careful with her speedy dial-ups. What use else? She rang my cousin and talked awhile, of the rain of which there is too much, and of me, of which there can never be enough. “Stay with me on the line till he comes back,” and so my cousin did. Kept my mother company while the old lady cried awhile, waiting for her shop gone husband.
(Irritation factor. "Irritation" does not cover it.)

Indefinite futures

We were supposed to move house the day after tomorrow. During a conversation with the builder yesterday, it rapidly became apparent that moving in, when there was still so much to do, was going to be a nightmare. We said we would try and get hold of the removal man to put things back. Today, the builder described it as "imperative" we did not move in. Unfortunately, we could not get hold of the removal man to tell him the move was imperatively off. Again. And would he mind moving us next week, or possibly the week after that or maybe sometime never? I had this vision of a large removal van turning up at the crack of dawn only for us to open a bedroom window and shout down: "Not today, thank you Milky." When we finally managed to touch base, Milky said he was charging us for Wednesday and that his next slot was in two weeks time unless he got a cancellation. Two weeks! Cancellation! What are the chances of a cancellation? Who cancels removal men? "Darling, I know we said we were moving. Well we're not. We will just live with the nice people who bought the house. They seemed fun, don't you think?" Obviously, "we" cancelled the removal men. Twice. But I cannot believe it happens that often. God. Two more weeks.

Maybe if I stopped wanting it so much, it would all come together. As it was, every time I walked into the cottage, I looked around and thought: "This is not going to get finished in time." But you do not want to seem like a panicky, depressive girly. You do not want to stick a finger in your mouth, twirl a curl round around and giggle nervously as a man tries to reach the finishing line. They do not like it. I was right though.

I think builders are natural optimists. They step through their own personal landscape of debris and chaos. They say: "I am really looking forward to getting stuck in to that big problem with the drains." They like banging their heads against brick walls. That way they get to knock them over. I am trying to keep it in "What's another week or two between friends?" perspective but I am desperate to stop squatting in the rented house. Ever since the boys dyed the kitchen carpet shocking pink, I have not been able to relax. Lately, I have not even wanted to get up on a morning. I have always been able to get up straight away. The last few weeks, I lie there until the children's screaming escalates to a pitch I cannot ignore. Then I get up and shout at whoever I see first. Victim or offender. I am not fussy. The only time I moved with the speed of light was one day last week when I heard my six-year-old tell the four-year-old: "Look. I have shaved my head." That got me up. Thank God, he was not entirely accurate. He had not shaved it. He had cut a large, sloping chunk out of the fringe. I cut the rest of it to match. It did not look that bad. Sometimes I think I should have been a hairdresser.

The whole process of getting back home is just taking so much time: packing or at least thinking about packing; endless fannying on about bits and bobs of furniture we have managed our entire lives without but which have become critically important to our happiness. Glamorous stuff like pan stackers and trivets. I mean "trivets". How have I managed all these years without a trivet? There was once a time when I did not even know what a trivet was. Ah. The innocence of youth. Then there is the Aga. All sorts of rituals appear necessary when a new Aga is installed. This afternoon, I spent several hours mopping down the sweat from the hulking brute. Normally, I would quite like that. But there was little return. I took up a slightly soapy cloth and washed it first. An hour later, the sweat was running from it. I tell you these things are very demanding. I expected something that would clean itself and do its share of the ironing. What do I get? A traditional "Mop me down and worship at my size". It does not even have any decent conversation. It just stands there saying: "Big aren't I?" over and over. Still, it is on now and it will keep the builders warm.

House about town

I am trying out a new cafe in the nearest market town. It has armchairs. This may sound like nothing very much but believe me, an armchair to drink a decent cup of coffee in, is right up there among my priorities alongside "Bring up the children to be decent human beings. Stop my mother getting any frailer. Make friends" and "Learn German".

Perhaps I will not need the armchair. I had an idea. The newly refurbished kitchen, at least the half refurbished kitchen has a high window. I have decided to buy two bar stools, tile the windowsill in black granite to match the work surfaces and acquire one of those large china coffee mugs that want to be a Starbucks paper cup. When particularly desperate, I could ask the nice man who drives the big red bus for golfers and tourists to come round and park in front of the kitchen window. I could stare out; pretend I am back in the city. I have it all planned. I will do the school run in the morning, buy the newspapers, and head for my little piece of London. I will turn on the Gaggia coffee maker, perhaps I will queue up by the sink for a while and leave some money in the children's toy till. I think that would work. The other advantage to my sill cafe is you do not need friends in Starbucks. If you sit there on your own, you feel not odd, but urban and busy. "Too busy for friends right this minute. Too busy thinking of romance. Too busy planning my career. Too busy writing this screenplay. I only just have time for this latte and one more piece of caramel shortbread." Alternatively, if my lonely coffee stop palled, I could always say to another mother: "Come round for a coffee. I will meet you at my windowsill. Ten'ish."

God knows, I need more coffee these days. I blame the osteopath for telling me to cut down on caffeine. If people stopped telling me what to do, I would not have the urge to go out and do the opposite. I also blame my caffeine cravings on the fact that we are due to move on Wednesday. We were due to move on Tuesday but pushed it back a day to buy our way back into the builders' affections after making them shift the bath. I went up to the cottage this morning. In fact, I went up to cottage three times within five hours. I suspect the builders have started hiding in my pantry when they see me coming. The plumber moves more slowly than they do. Or perhaps he cannot fit. I said to him: "Thank you for moving the bath." He did not say anything in return; at all; he just looked at me. He could have been thinking: "In this light, when she stands like that, she looks like Kate Moss" but I do not think he was.

There seems to be so much to do. Every problem knocks on to create another problem. Damp has started coming through the walls of the family living room and the kitchen. They have only just been painted. They have to be repainted with a silicone product. The decorator was already miserable because he painted everywhere several weeks ago, then electricians and plumbers ran cables down his walls. He said to me this morning: "This has been my worst job for 10 years. I am three or four weeks behind. " I felt quite guilty. So guilty I could not bring myself to ask him to repaint the two walls of the hearth which he lovingly tinted a warm pinkish colour to match the red square tiles underneath the stove. Yesterday, I picked out beige and duck egg green curtains. I think the curtains may insist on the hearth being beige. I am going to let them tell him.

Good cop; bad cop

It is less than a week till we move back into the cottage. It is difficult to believe it will all be ready. I do not think I helped when I asked the builders to move the bath they had just installed. They went off me a bit then I think. I walked into the bathroom and the roll top bath was pressed against the wall as if it had a crush on it. It looked terrible. Admittedly, the builders did ask me whether I wanted it to stand away from the wall or against it. I might have said: "Against it." I did not mean obscenely pressed against it, right against it, up against it. I did not mean for the bath to make a show of herself. I meant more of a casually, in the vicinity, if you happen to be passing then feel free to call in "against it". It is in fact not just the bath which is up against it, it is the builders. I thought about not saying anything. I always think about not saying anything. Then I climbed into the bath and realised you could not rest your elbow on the side or put your hand on the bath to lever yourself up. I thought: "Every time I have a bath I am going to think: 'This over-priced bath is far too close to that newly plastered wall in a bathroom I have just paid good money for and which I hoped would be perfect because it is costing enough to be perfect'." I said to the builder: "Slight problem." He was incredibly calm about it bearing in mind the plumbers had only just finished plumbing it all in. Sometimes though, I think my husband should have these conversations without me. The wrong insulation on the spec. My husband said: "You talk to the architect. He likes you." The mixer tap arrived bent and the taps arrived without their "Hot" and "Cold" buttons. My husband said: "You ring them." The Aga was installed surprisingly far from the wall. My husband said: "You talk to them." I say: "Why do I always have to be the bad guy." He looks at me with puppy dog eyes. "You know how I hate confrontation" he says, throwing down the nice guy card and sweeping up the chips. He wins both ways. I confront. The situation changes. For the better. For the both. He hands me a bullet for the gun, hands me a bullet belt for better rat-a-tat. I fire and in between their ragged, bloody gasps the wounded think: "I don't know how that nice bloke puts up with that stroppy baggage." My husband then will kindly smile down upon their suffering faces, uncork his canteen of water to wet their dry and cracked lips; then straighten up, beckon over his armoured wife, point, smile again and say: "This one's not dead yet."

Sweet home

Two weeks today we are supposed to move house. Again. This time in the right direction out of the rented house and back into what is supposed to be our Northumberland dream home. Two weeks does not strike me as a long time when I look at the cottage. It still does not have a bathroom although it does have half a kitchen. There are carcasses of creamy doored cabinets but no svelte black granite tops; half an oak planked floor, the rest, polystyrene and wooden struts; half a pantry, that is to say, an alcove but no shelves. The builders have only just finished knocking another hole in a wall to connect two rooms. I was slightly disconcerted because I had forgotten the rooms were supposed to be connected. I said: "Are you sure you weren't holding the plans upside down?" They tell me they weren't.

I respect our architect's talent and creativity. He is also a very nice man who has come up with a design for a family home which works on a number of levels. I suspect he has not warmed to me after I accused him of chauvinism (perhaps I had PMT that day), reinstated the pantry which he hated and which I had agreed to scrap(women can be so indecisive) and, most recently, wanted a forensic analysis of why the wrong sort of insulation was put into the roof space (and picky. They can be very, very picky.). He had specified the type of insulation but local planners do not accept it. He said this was a recent change in planning regulations. I said: "How recent?" (I have no idea why I do not have any friends up here.) To his credit, he agreed to absorb the cost of the £1,500 to £2,000 insulation in his own bill. I am pretty sure he will not want to keep in touch after the job is over.

I am not sure what my builders think of me. I like the fact they take decisions. I just like to know the reasons behind the decisions. "Why have you put the pantry door on that way round?" "Why can we have a flat floor when we couldn't a week ago?" "Why have you knocked down that wall?" The builder looks at me for a split second. Sometimes, I think he is constructing his answer. Sometimes, I think he is thinking: "Why. Do you ask all these questions?" They are very patient with me but I think they like to talk to my husband. I suspect he provides them with answers rather than questions. Maybe they just feel sorry for him. Maybe they think I ask him: "Why do you want sex with me tonight?" Anyway, they have another two weeks to finish off the job and give us our house back. It will not be entirely finished. There is a string of arches in the farmyard which are also being converted. Work will continue on the arches when we move back in but I do not mind that. Frankly I will miss the builders when they leave.

I really want to move back. I feel adrift. It has been nice to be in a village to see other houses and cars drive by but I want to get on with my life. I want to move into a home where we have space, where we can stretch out and breathe. There is a pond in the garden of this rented house. We carefully covered it up. The boys equally carefully uncovered it. I want to open the door and let my sons out to play in the garden without worrying about whether they will drown. I want to fill my pantry with fancy tinned stuff that looks like art and glass jars of fruit we will never eat, not even at Christmas. I want to keep vanilla pods in sugar and have everything just so. For a day at least. That will be a very good day. One to remember. I want to go home.

Future tense

My builder has taken to breaking off large pieces of plaster board and writing messages in pencil on them. They say things like: "2 18" X 16" 4 M L" and "End bathroom right". Little arrows slide up and down and, alongside, numbers carrying fractions on their hips. It is all very Old Testament. I am daily expecting to read a larger chunk along the lines: "Thou shalt honour thy builder and his building mates. Thou shalt pay thy builder on time. Thou shalt hold thy builder above thine architect and shalt not take the name of thy builder in vain. Thou shalt not question thy builder about tea breaks. Thou shalt not covet thy builder's Saturdays and Sundays for in a number of months thy builder shalt make thy kitchen and thy bathroom and any number of other rooms for thee and thine and he hast need of the odd day off to resteth and to watcheth sport on TV. Thou shalt admire thy builder's craftsmanship and speak highly of him to all comers. Thou shalt abjure temples like B&Q and the false gods of DIY. Thou shalt appreciate thy builder is passing on his discount from his trade suppliers."

Even without a holy diktat, I am impressed by the skill I see around me in the cottage. I enjoy seeing the evidence of craftsmanship. There are things I have spent years learning how to do. Listening, for instance. When I talk to someone, I am all attention. I want to hear what they say, how they feel, what they think, what they do not realise they are feeling or thinking. I want to know. Not just for the sake of it but to understand their sorrow or their joy, to know them better. To make a friend. To keep a friend. To be a friend. To know, you have to listen. In the same way, I can appreciate the skill in a plaster perfect wall; the subtle, creamy finish of a painted room; a red clay flattened brick rescued from underneath the kitchen floor, cleaned and proud in a newly opened up hearth; a landing floor, quilt patched with wood rescued from that kitchen floor, each piece eased in and nailed down by a craftsman. It is not just a matter of a job and a bill. I can appreciate the efforts of a man trying to steam, sand, scrape and burn whitewash and distemper, clinging tight to the ceiling beams it has loved for years. I know his arms ache and his breath catches in the dust as he helps to build an idea of a house.

A friend told me that I am in a conversation with the house. True. My house speaks to me of the past, the present and the future. In that corner of what will be my living room, a pantry stood; that windowsill by a greasy wall was where the woman made her cream and butter; the hearth we have uncovered, once held a kitchen range. I have listened and learnt something of the house and those who lived here, in the rewriting of its rooms and passages. The present, of course, is around in all its brick dusted glory, patterns keyed in the render, electric cables hanging from the walls, strangers who have become friends marking the rooms with their skills. But I can see the future better than the present. As I stood on the landing looking down the painted corridor through the house, I saw soft painted walls and light from mended windows. The walls pushed back to open up the route between what were two houses, knitting the divide with space. I thought: "Perhaps this could be my home. Perhaps I could hang pictures along these walls."

Playing House

I like and trust my builder - he is conscientious, wants to solve problems that come up, is helpful, intelligent, reliable and just very nice all round. He would be good to have as a brother-in-law. He built his own beautiful house even futher North than we are so he looks at the issue of costs from both sides - making a living and the "Oh my God, you have to be kidding" side. I asked him for a list of costs for all those jobs we want doing which are not in the spec. I do wish I hadn't.

"List of prices for extras
Painter
Stripping and Danish oiling beams £300
Stripping and repainting existing windows £335
Cottage B, master bedroom, en-suite, stairwell and corridor to
Cottage A. stripping wallpaper, two coats emulsion to walls and ceilings,
undercoating and glossing woodwork (assuming re-plastered) £850

Builder
Making good and re-plastering in A. £1,500
As above to stairwell and corridor in B. £500
Removing floor and replacing with concrete sub floor with damp
proof membrane and insulation in kitchen- extra cost negated by
builders saving from floor in barn.
Roof- extra cost of using slate- cost removed as goodwill gesture
(saving retrieved from scaffold hire)

Joiner
Installing DPM(damp proof membrane), insulation and oak flooring to new family lounge and boiler room £2,100 (Flooring included in price)
Laying oak floor to kitchen (fixed to 50mm x 50mm battens on architects
recommendation) same arrangements as above £1,700.

Other extras still to price
Joiner
repairing existing windows
installing client’s loft ladder, plaster boarding sloping ceilings and laying chipboard flooring to loft area above boiler room and part of family room
forming shelving to wall in new corridor
Builder
making good fireplace in family room. Installing multi fuel stove will be about double the cost of a conventional fire
Forming fireplace, flue and chimney to accommodate client’s stove in barn
Taking down garden wall, installing proper foundation and re-building to client’s design"

There is a certain irony here. The house is like an art installation, the smell of dusty pink plaster in the air, ersatz snatches of ancient paper shouting out pop hits from the seventies as it clings to its youth on the walls. As you pick your way around doorframes emptied of their doors and walk through the disappeared walls, you look for rooms that are not there. Your eye is caught by pipework twisted off like an unfinished sentence, the hanging, questioning flex and exposed brickwork taking you back to basics. The house, the two houses, are a statement on the grammar of your life - mixed up and incoherent. We are struggling to bring it all together, men are sweating out their days to brick-build our dreams and yet I can see it all slipping away. Can you have a dream house and an unhappy child living in it? I do not think so. We had a successful meeting at school this week; we figured our way through to strategies that will protect my six-year-old and get him past his feelings of isolation. The only problem is my son does not yet know that his problems are over; that happy days are here again. He did not want to go to school today.

Living in Denmark

The builder knocked at the door to see if we were coming up to the cottage today. That is never a good sign. It is the financial equivalent of a policeman walking slowly up your garden path in the middle of the day, shaking his head. It is not going to be good news, is it? You do not look through your slightly grubby net curtains and think: "Oh good, there's a panda car parked outside and a grim-faced bobby heading my way." My very nice builder nodded at me. "We've found dry rot," he said it quickly as if it would hurt less that way. Little hanging things are dangling under the floorboards. Apparently there was a give-away smell of apples when he broke through the floor. When we went up to inspect ourselves, I knelt down and edged close to the gaping black hole. I sniffed; to me it smelled like dirt and several thousand pounds.

The other slight glitch in our plans is the four inch difference in height he also discovered between the two cottages. On the "up" side, this might not be a problem if you had one leg shorter than the other. They were supposed to knock down a wall between the two cottages and make one big kitchen. They knocked down the wall, all but two bricks of it, to discover one house has effectively been built on its own platform. We now have to chose between a smaller kitchen and a step up, into a dining area - effectively two rooms - or swamping the entire downstairs in concrete, as you would if you were planning a Victorian extravaganza on ice. Oh, and the grain shute they found in the arches which made me think "Golly, I have a grain shute. That is what you call an original feature. We'll keep that." Gone, rotten to the core.

"Is it... umm?"

Site meeting with the builder and the architect. There is suspiciously less house than there was. I was reconciled to the loss of the kitchen wall but there are walls missing all over now. It is as if someone is rubbing out bits of my life. The meeting went quite well apart from the fact one of the cottages needs to be entirely replastered because of the state of the existing plaster work. "Is it in the spec?" I asked hopefully. No, it's not in the spec so that is an add-on cost. I spotted some cracks in the plaster work upstairs. It looked as though the wall was thinking about leaning backwards to get a better view of the sea. The builder reassured me that it would not be just gaily replastered. He slapped a hard-skinned, dusty hand against its fragile plaster skin. "We'll get a rubber mallet and we'll make sure it's all quite sound before we do the replastering." He slapped it again - brutish and professional. I did not find that as reassuring as he expected; I could tell the wall felt the same way.

It is the unpredictability of it all that I find mildly disconcerting; as if you had clambered on to a big red bus and said to the conductor: "A single to...well, wherever we end up." The downstairs concrete floor is uneven and I would like it to be warmer. There is a solution; polystyrene, chipboard and oak flooring. "Is it in the spec?" Funny you should ask - No. The last time I was up, I asked about stripping back the peeling painted beams in the living room. Today I was told the decorator had thought about it and said it would be very expensive (I already knew that was not in the spec); the builder suggested we might be better painting them in blackboard paint. Why would I want to paint them in blackboard paint of all things I wondered. Also, we have knocked down so many walls, there is an unsupported staircase which hangs in the middle of the living room. It looked OK on paper but in reality it is reminiscent of being on board a ship. I keep expecting a cabin boy to skip down it with a tankard of ale for the captain. I wondered whether it could be moved. It can't.

We were presented with a bill for the first four weeks of work: £7,500. I am sure it could have been worse. I still like my builder and the envelope could have had my name on it rather than my husband's. Why would they put his name on and not mine I wondered? The architect handed it to me; I looked at it and thought: "What the hell, it's not addressed to me." I smiled cheerfully at my husband and passed it along.