Day 15: Rocking all over the Garden

Back to the blog again today after my brief hiatus. I will be demanding a rematch on the badminton front. At least now I know how I'm supposed to serve, so I shall look to build on that!


I worked from home today. This meant that my cogitations were accompanied by the builders' choice of music as they merrily piled brick upon brick in their quest to reach the mysterious "plate" by the end of the week. I love delicious coincidence so was thrilled when Pink Floyd's "(Another brick in) The Wall" came on. [If the Welhams are reading this - note the strategic use of pub quiz song title brackets!] This was followed by The mighty Quo and Rocking all over the World - marvellous fun. May have gone a bit far in informing Twitter that my builders were "Bricking all over the Garden."


A lady from Reading building control came around and I heard her pronounce the very words "That's fine, you can carry on." I am taking this as gold standard reassurance that everything is going to be fine with the council.

A small issue has come to light regarding the supporting of the remainder of the chimney breast which will be suspended above the new cloakroom. Apparently there are still too many bricks up there to just leave it unsupported, so we're going to need another steel. This will need to be lodged in the wall between us and our neighbours. In order to check that the wall is suitable for supporting a steel Gavin is going to come round and poke a hole in our wall to see how thick it is... there is a small risk that he will poke right through into our neighbours' house. Amy and John have just finished a complete renovation of their house including replastering all of the walls, so you can imagine how popular Gavin will be if he suddenly appears through an impromptu peephole.

This afternoon the man from Optiplan came round to measure up for the kitchen. All was going swimmingly until he said: "OK, so we'll be looking to start installation on November 22nd." Now, for those of you enlightened souls who have read the Twilight novels, you'll know that "Edward's" reaction to stress is to become unnaturally still. My Edward is somewhat the same. "Hmmm," he said, as we both mentally noted that our kitchen is coming out on Monday next week, so this will leave us nearly SIX WEEKS without a kitchen! We have asked Gavin to have a word with the chief kitchen guy to see if he can hurry them along a little, and actually, we can get Gavin to do all of his bits and just re-wire and re-plumb our existing cooker, fridge and dishwasher into the new kitchen, but this isn't ideal in any sense.

Simon, the Optiplan guy, told us that if we spotted any problems after the initial install we should bring them up immediately with the fitters, noting cheekily that, "there's an important date about a month from the 22nd November that you'll want it finished by!" "Yes," said I, "My mother-in-law is coming to visit then, and if it's not flipping perfect I shall ask her to sort out whoever is responsible." I hope this has stricken fear into his very soul.

This really is a bit of a blow, although all seasoned renovators will now be nodding their heads sagely at our naivete. We had rather hoped that we'd be done and dusted by mid-November, but it doesn't look like there's a cat's chance in hell that it will be. Speaking of cats, I swopped several amusing cat-related anecdotes with Nick the builder this morning. Neither of us are enormous fans of the furry little monsters, so we passed a fun ten minutes swopping stories of mild cat torture, and in his case, taking matters into his own hands when the vet wanted to charge him £40 to put his girlfriend's cat down...