Four months on

and what do we have to show for it?

Some plusses:

1. we now have new carpet everywhere and it's great, thanks. Particularly loving our hand-woven Brintons designer stuff in the hallway. We went for something a bit different there, expecting people to say "eek" and wonder what to make of it, but so far, everyone has loved it. Clearly our tastes are less unpalatable than we thought.
2. we love the big kitchen and everyone who sees it gets an instant "wow" factor from it. It's also helping us burn off the calories gained from all the cooking going on, walking backwards and forwards across the room to get things from all the cupboards
3. the house is starting to get a rhythm to it, in terms of how we use it. OK, so there are still some spots to finish off; a few things that are more "down" than "away" and we always seem to have one box more clutter than we have cupboards to hide it in (the garage is now too full!), for the main part things are starting to find their place.
4. we're slowly kitting out the utility, putting up cupboards and shelves - just a matter of putting in some new units to replace the knackered ones that used to be in the kitchen
5. we now have a funky cupboard hiding our electricity meter, meaning I don't keep looking over my shoulder in the study to see how fast it's whizzing round, each time I turn something on.
6. this cupboard also has lots of shelving around it, so it feels like a proper study (although it begs the question why did we paint it if we were just going to hide the walls with books)

Things have also sufficiently settled that we've got down to doing other things around the house. Progress so far includes

1. putting loads more insulation in the loft over the "old" part of the house, where there wasn't much (just the 4 inches or so, rather than the currently recommended 8 feet, or whatever). I can thoroughly recommend Eco-Wool to you. It's made from recycled plastic bottles, so plenty of bonus eco-points and it is genuinely nice to use - it feels like the filling from synthetic duvets, rather than horrid glass fibre
2. properly boarding part of the loft so it can really be used for storage (necessary now that we have extra insulation in a lot of the areas where we were previously dumping things). Boarding was complicated somewhat by our rafters. They don't seem to be at the same spacing as all the loft boarding materials expect them to be. Hence I've had to double board (it was just easier than cutting the boards to size) to ensure there aren't any dodgy overlaps of board. I put some Knauf Space Board between the layers of boards to provide some extra insulation over that part of the loft because you can't get enough regular insulating material in the areas you want to board. Four inches of old glass fibre between the rafters and 52mm of this in between the layers of board should help.
3. building a raised veg patch in the garden. We decided that the gravelled area at the end of the garden was not really doing a useful job as a sitting/eating area, so we got rid of the gravel, dug over the soil and built a raised bed. It's about 10ft x 8ft and 12in tall, sawn and screwed together with my own fair hands (and power tools). It contains just about 3 tons of soil, carted around by me and it had better grow us bucket loads of exceedingly tasty vegetables or I will be decidedly miffed.

We have our plan for reclaiming the rest of the garden. It involves yet more shovelling, this time putting the bark chippings from the old play area, er, elsewhere (probably into a big sack at first), then rotovating all the muddy area, levelling it out with a ton or so extra soil and then turfing it. We'll probably have to leave the turfing until Spring, to make sure it doesn't get frosted, but as soon as I've finished the loft, I'll get on to the digging and rotovating. The only (presently obvious) complication there is going to be rotovating the soil since we discovered that the drainage pipe for the soakaway is only a couple of inches below the surface of the mud, rather than the 12 inches or so that it should be (well done Paul the Builder). So we're going to have to work around that VERY carefully.

Back in the world of outstanding problems with the house, Paul the Builder never came back to us to fix any of his mistakes. After taking some legal advice, we gave him a "reasonable" amount of time to come and fix it and got on with employing other people to come and fix it. We now have an invoice of all the things he needs to pay us back for, it's up to about £1200.

All we have to do now is decide whether we take him to court over it (and risk him counter-suing for his £5,000 or so of surprising - to the point of punitive - new costs) or just forget about it all and write off the £1200 as a reasonable fee to get the house working AND see the back of the useless clown. Still, I'd rather have had the money to fritter away on Christmas presents (or more bits of hifi or a camera or... well anything other than fixing a badly fitted shower).

The coup de gras in that particular saga recently was the denoument of the shower episode. You'll remember the background from this blog update. Anyway, we had the engineer fix it for us and eventually got the bill from the manufacturer that we were warned would come if it proved to be an installation defect. We, reasonably, thought this bill should go to Paul the Builder, since he solemnly promised it was installed correctly and must be a manufacturing fault and got the manufacturer to redirect the invoice to him. Surprise, surprise, we get another letter from the manufacturer saying that Paul the Builder denied all knowledge of the problem and that he had no involvement in the process. Well, I assume it was Paul the Builder, he decided to be a real man about it and get his wife to write and sign the letter. Presumably if we keep pestering him about his liability, he'll get his dad onto us.

So, there we go. This time, last year, we'd just got planning permission and were getting building regs sorted out and thinking about choosing builders. Now, we're basically finished and - for the main part - everything we can't deal with is our own problem.

Looking back, 2007 seems to have flown by. Although at the time, parts of it during the building work seemed to be going backwards, not just Glacially slowly forward.

Next time, we buy somewhere that does everything we need from the start.

Fatally Flawed

16 hours after my last post and we have made precisely NO progress with the whole "laying the carpets" thing.

Ok, that's not quite true. We've got our old fridge out of the kitchen in readiness and done some other bits of tidying up. But that's about it.

The fitter eventually turned up at about 9.45. Just 45 minutes late, then. We first suspected there was a problem from the discouraging way he said "oh" when he saw that there was still furniture in the room. He didn't realise that we'd paid good money for him and his trained monkey to shift the furniture and started tutting at us about this. So we shifted some stuff, they shifted other stuff.

Then the real fun began. The whole walking-around-shaking-his-head bit started just after that and he got really worried as it dawned on him that he'd have to lay a floor, rather than stand around drinking tea all day.

So the excuses started rolling in. The floor was too uneven. It had too many lumps. And hollow bits. And ridges too. In fact it was generally lacking in flat bits. And the planks of laminate were too big to fit in the cloakroom. And he didn't have enough sugar in his tea.

Apparently, laying a plywood subfloor on some parts of it and a concrete screed to level the other areas somehow wouldn't work and we'd end up with a floor that moved around more than a plate of spaghetti and bounced more than a springboard and he just wasn't prepared to do it. Instead, he recommended we have a completely different, and much more expensive, type of floor.

I was getting a bit stressed by this. I already knew that Paul the Builder had left the floor in a bit of a mess, but we'd been promised that this could be sorted, now it seems it could not. "Ugh!" I joked to the fitter, "I think I need a valium." He shot back with "I've got some in the van, if you like" and the room fell silent. After another awkward minute, he felt compelled to clarify "It's not because I'm mad or nothing, I've just got a bad back."

OK, thanks for that.

So, he put us in such a downer that he decided to go back to the warehouse and talk to his boss to see what could be done for us.

A while later, we get a phonecall from the boss. We talk through the problem. He can't understand what the fitter is talking about; he and I agree what we're expecting and can't see why the fitter had a problem. I ask him to talk to the fitter some more and let us know what our options are.

He calls back saying that he's found the problem. Apparently the fitter has turned into a workshy prima donna and has been sacked. He'll get the other guy to fit the kitchen and then do our carpets later in the week.

Bloody typical.

Poop poop, said Thomas!

Well, the carpet fitting process is now merely hours away from commencement. I should be in bed, really. But no, instead I thought I'd post a few more harrowing details of life to keep you all occupied. It's partly a communications tool, partly a communications avoidance mechanism. I post it here once and that means I need to have 5 fewer conversations with friends about the whole subject. Actually, I'm not so sure this will stop me ranting in person, but at least I get to sort out where to put the pauses for breath.

As you may have gathered, the carpet bloke recovered from his bout of whatever-it-was. He arrives in 8.5 hours to start on the kitchen, by evening out the lumpy floor, before actually laying our floor of choice. Then - apparently - the rest of the house gets carpeted in the blink of an eye, almost. Believe it when it's done, frankly, but either way, I have to help getting all the bookshelves emptied into boxes before I can start on the really tedious job of dismantling the entire hifi / TV system and my computer network. Again. Wireless networks were meant to make the whole process easier, but tell that to the people who make USB devices. One day they'll actually make their cables long enough.

But enough digression, time's a wastin' and I need sleep.

Anyway, we wrote to Paul the Builder advising of the few little, shall we say, lapses in concentration of which he was guilty and respectfully asking him to come fix them (Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 and all that, eh). Instead of the contrite and friendly response, we get some shirty letter from him blaming us for everything that's gone wrong. Well, I can see his point, he clearly has no control over most of his workforce, so maybe it is our fault that his carpenter (turned window fitter, it seems) tightened the screws on one window so tightly that he cracked the glass. Not entirely sure from where he got the idea that we supplied the kitchen, given that he did it himself, *ahem* from his preferred supplier *ahem*, but apparently it's our fault that the sink is poor quality. Yes, I remember the day I made it well. It was quite sunny outside and I wanted to go and sit in the park so I hurried the job. Riiiight.

However, I have a suspicion that I'm going to have to start being a little careful about what I say about this now, because it has the whiff of a situation which is going to end up in court.

The coup de grace of his shirty letter was a demand for £5K to be paid before he fixed anything, for a bunch of extras that he was apparently too busy to include in his previous "final invoice". Or maybe he's just forgotten that he has no contract to support the idea that the work would cost more, and has completely forgotten the basis of a fixed price contract.

Methinks he's trying to do it to frighten us off.

Methinks he has chosen the wrong people with whom to mess.

Methinks he can turn up and fix it all and pay us for all the stuff he's broken.

Time will tell.

Hang on, what's that chuffing noise, then?

Well, life at Whitzend is starting to resemble something that could pass for normality. Increasingly the things with which we cannot deal are our own problems...

There are, of course, honourable exceptions to this rule.

Remember we mentioned that the shower was a bit flakey, in terms of finding the thermostatically balanced temperature? Paul the Builder was adamant that he'd fitted it correctly and it must be "dodgy parts, mate". Well, convinced by his eloquent argument, we called the manufacturer who sent out an engineer.

The engineer almost screamed when he saw the installation. The first thing he said was that the shower was fitted completely wrongly. He even showed us the big, red warning all over the instruction manual saying why one should never do exactly what Paul the Builder had done.

So, we need both showers to have their cold water supplies connected properly and have their valves replaced with the ones supplied, rather than the cheap pieces of jointing copper that Paul the Builder chose to use.

Whilst that engineer was here, I happened to mention the leaky sinks, which Paul had also ascribed to duff materials. Again, it turns out to be bad workmanship - the wastes have simply not been sealed to the sinks properly in either bathrooms (or the kitchen)

According to Trading Standards, we are obliged to give Paul the Builder an opportunity to come and fix his mistakes. To be honest, we'd really rather this was not the case, given the mess he made first time around (and second time around in the case of the kitchen sink) and the lies he's told in the process of it. But rules are rules, so we wrote him an official sounding letter, quoting all the consumer legislation that Trading Standards reminded us to quote, and gave him 7 days to fix it.

Before we even posted the letter, we were left hopeful by a text message from Paul, saying he'd come and fix things last Monday. In (not quite eager) anticipation, we waited until the end of Monday to see him and didn't post the letter. He returned the compliment by not turning up. So we posted the letter and he's still not come by.

On the one hand this means that we're almost certainly going to get the repair work done by someone reliable and qualified. On the downside, it means we'll have to pay for it all and then try to reclaim the money from him. This has the whiff of small claims court all over it already, to be honest. Ho hum.

Irritatingly, the day after we sent the letter outlining the things we wanted fixing, we found another thing - a bit of guttering they'd fitted which just isn't properly connected to the rest of the gutter, causing water to pour out through it, right past the bedroom window of Little Miss. I suspect the rules are that we have to send another letter and wait another seven days.

We've finally chosen carpets and booked fitting in. Happily, the fitters will also lay the laminate in our kitchen, so we get the whole house done at once. I'm sure it'll be hell on earth for a couple of days, but it's reassuring to know that the whole thing's almost done. Plenty of mottled, neutral colours which will help to brighten the place up a lot. Except for the hallway where we've branched out a little and planned a little "surprise". So, mind the mantrap and bear pit, visitors!

Carpets were meant to be fitted later this week but apparently our fitter collapsed on the job last Thursday (at least it was on someone else's floor). He's got something viral that looks like flu and a damaged coccyx so things have been postponed by a week. Still, that's more time to get all the other little jobs finished. A weekend of putting up towel rails and curtain track without fear of sullying the new carpet. Great.

Just the garden to go, then. Off to the turf accountants it is!

Light at end of tunnel in "not oncoming train" shocker

Well, cripes, blink and you miss it, there goes August.

So, we stayed at the in-laws a while longer and the weeks of "overrun" mounted . Then we went on holiday. Then we came back and... it was almost finished.

Eventually all the plastering got done. We admitted defeat on the painting but by a stroke of utter (if deserved) luck we found a helpful and amenable decorator who lived just round the corner and was able to drop everything and paint almost the entire house in about a week, whilst we were shivering away on the North Norfolk coast (fast becoming a family tradition).

We got back from holiday and all the walls were painted. Most of the woodwork too. The kitchen was fitted and tiled and all the windows had the right glass in them. The collective sigh of relief must have been audible across the Chilterns.

Then we made the mistake of using the kitchen sink. It blocked.

Then we made the mistake of trying to open the back door. It wouldn't because it had been hung badly.

Then we made the mistake of trying to flush the toilet in the family bathroom. It wouldn't.

Then we made the mistake of trying to shut some of the internal doors. They wouldn't latch.

Then we made the mistake of looking in our garage. It was still full of building materials

So, we held our breath again and counted to 10 in a variety of languages, put up with it for the weekend, before calling Paul the Builder. He had a go at us for not calling him over the weekend, which seemed odd. He insisted that his "don't call me until Monday" text message had been a joke. I'd assumed that the only thing about him that was a joke was his project management skills, but apparently not.

Fixing the kitchen sink required a complete replumbing of it, which only served to highlight the rubbish job he'd done in the first place. Apparently there was a trap at the bottom of the tangle of badly fitting pipes which should have been removed to deal with the blockage. However, his dodgy plumbing meant that the trap (which needed to be unscrewed and pulled downwards) was hard up against the base of the unit it was inside, so this was not possible. Although we put some food through the waste disposal, the thing which seemed to cause the blockage was a big lump of silicone sealant that it was wrapped around and which seemed to match the large globs of sealant he'd used to try and connect the mismatching pipes in the waste of the sink.

Still, it was almost entertaining watching all the ways you could make dirty water squirt up out of various plug holes and overflows by blocking up various combinations of outlets. Not entertaining enough to want to do it again, mind.

But now our kitchen sink drains happily (although we did have to call out DynoRod one more time, when the poncey trap he put in the outside drain blocked up too). The main problem with the kitchen plumbing is that the water flow from the hot tap is so slow it's almost impossible to run a bowl of hot water to wash up, because by the time it's full the water has gone cold. Apparently this is down to our choice of tap, rather than his plumbing. This seems mildly ironic because the tap is from his recommended supplier, whereas the utility sink is our naff old B&Q one and that flow is fine. Hardly seems worth starting an argument with him about this, though.

Unfortunately, unblocking the sink ruined the kitchen unit it sits in, so he had to replace that in the process. Still, the complete mess he made of drilling holes in it for the various water pipes is rather artistic, in a Jackson Pollock sort of way. This was only matched by the utter mess he made of our stop tap. During the early building work, Paul the Builder extolled the virtue of using polypipe for the water main and made sure to put a nice run of pipe so we could have our stop tap in a sensible place. Unfortunately, at some point in the project this all went a bit wrong and the pipe got cut off too short so our stop tap is underneath the kitchen base units, only accessible by taking off the kickboard under the units and reaching under the sink, right to the wall. Not great if you have a water leak in the kitchen since you'll be lying face down in water to do this.

Plumbing in general just doesn't seem to be a strong point. The non-flushing toilet was, apparently, down to a duff plastic unit from B&Q. He claims it was like that when he got it out of the packet, but I'm not 100% convinced. He charged us handsomely for a lovely new plastic unit to replace it but it still won't flush reliably. This much it has in common with the other two toilets. Neither of the bathroom sinks actually holds water with the plug in, either. So I can't confess to being entirely happy with this.

Neither am I happy with the fact that we are going to have to spend about £500 getting our kitchen floor sorted out before we can lay our flooring. The chap we had round to quote on the job said that the floor is so uneven we're going to need hardboard bases putting in some areas and a latex leveling screed putting in other areas. Bizarre, I thought I'd already paid to have a level floor put in. My mistake, evidently.

It has to be said now that carpet is just about the only thing left to sort out and, frankly, I can't wait. This sounds daft, I'm sure, but I am still surprised at how dusty the floor is. All the rooms with no floor (which includes the kitchen, my study, our bedroom and Little Miss's bedroom) are a constant source of plaster dust every time you step on them. You do not want to drop clothes on those floors because they get covered in it. We have to get dressed standing in the middle of the bed. And boy do you notice where they've not hammered in the nails into the floorboards properly.

Anyway, I'm happy now because Paul the Builder and his crew of merry men are now out of our lives. They've left the site and I don't expect they'll be coming back. I can't really be bothered to fight over the kitchen floor not being level. It's almost worth £500 to me to make sure they don't come back. Equally, the ongoing and slightly bitter argument about our central heating can wither on the vine now. We agreed that he would refund me the £100 he charged because his people broke our old heating controller and he had to replace it (apparently it was our fault for still wanting to live in the house and demand heating or hot water, other wise he'd have carefully removed it before his boys ripped a radiator off the wall above it and drenched the thing). Having refunded me, he spun me some utterly rubbish story about the way the boiler worked to justify the fact he'd put in a cheap and simplistic controller for the heating. Once I found this to be wrong - by calling up the boiler manufacturer - he started to get very shirty with me about replacing it, once again threatening to dredge up all sorts of other hidden costs that he would start to charge me for. I did point out that he caused over £600 of damage to stuff in our house (from the bookcase his carpenter fell through, to my office chair which is randomly missing some of its wheels, to the candlewick bedspread which they decided to cut up and use as a general cleaning cloth, etc).

Again, by not pursuing this I keep him out of my life, which I now consider a victory.

And there we go. A nice, straightforward 8-10 week project which would need us to be out of the house for at most 2 weeks. Instead, it lasted about 17 weeks and we were out of the house for 8 weeks. Ugh.

On the plus side:

• Our new bedroom is wonderful. We've finally got most of the new furniture built and installed - a decision I'm bound to regret when the carpet fitters turn up and demand we empty the rooms, but still - and it's still a good size and the views are lovely. Being away from the road mean it's really quiet too.
• The boys are really enjoying having their own bedrooms (although it took number 2 a little while to get used to the idea of having his own space) and it means that we've been able to move quite a few toys out of the playroom so this is now a nicer space to be in.
• The kitchen is great, and will be even better once we've decided exactly where everything ought to live (and where the heck we've put everything).
• Having a utility room is cool. Even though we've not quite worked out how to arrange things in there, yet (our oh-so-bright builders decided to put the appliances in there whilst we were away and cleverly put the freezer in so that you can't open the door properly because of the radiator) it's nice to have one room where the clothes washing happens and - for me - even better that it's not right outside my study door.
• The new colours of the rooms are fabulous and make the rooms look big. This is especially noticeable in the hallway.
• It even feels nice to have our garage back (particularly as the enormous stack of flat-pack furniture gradually diminishes - only 1 double wardrobe, 1 bedside table, a kitchen table and 9 chairs to go!)
  

On balance, then, an overwhelming relief that the whole thing is over and a growing sense of delight that the house is finally ours to live in again.

Game over.

Post script:
About a week or so after we came back from holiday, we were still waiting for the last of the building materials to be removed from the garage. Paul the Builder was claiming to be keen to get it moved on because he needed it for his new project (presumably the one to which we lost most of our workers as we approached the final limp to the finish). We were told that the householders had not returned from holiday, so there had been no access to the garage to store their stuff securely. Now they were home and everything could move one project to the right.

Saturday afternoon, around teatime, there was a knock on the door (Paul's men still hadn't put the doorbell back). It was the lady of the house from Paul the Builder's new project was at the door. Obviously she HAD returned from holiday now (though her plasterboard was still in our garage). She wanted to ask if we were happy with our project. Given that we were still living with quite a few of the, er, idiosyncrasies of the project at that stage we gave rather a warts and all account of what had happened. She went pale. She told us about her situation: it seems that her project had started whilst they were on holiday. Nothing wrong with this you may think, but the issue was more that she hadn't asked them to start - even she had not signed a contract. She also had her suspicions that the chimney stack she'd asked to be rebuilt had only been repointed. Furthermore, she told us about some research she'd been doing on other of his projects and all was not well. As well as one other project we knew he was being sued over, there was another project where he was being sued because someone's new floor had been condemned. Seems like we got off lightly.

Anyway, we agreed that she should definitely look elsewhere for her plumbing services and she was seriously considering telling them all to get out and stay out. Good luck to her. She has my sympathy, but I'm just glad this is over.

Next time, we buy a house that has all the rooms and amenities we want.

Pictures of our interior will doubtless arrive in due course for your delight and delectation. As soon as I work out where the lead for my camera has gone. Pictures of the exterior will follow, too, once we've got a landscape gardener in to get rid of all the rubble and concrete embedded into the mud which Paul the Builder could not be bothered to remove.

Thanks for reading, watch this space for more pictures in the (hopefully) not too distant future.

further beyond a joke?

Right, stay calm. Breathe. Let go of the sharp implement... It can't be that bad. It just CAN'T.

Surely?

OK, let's start gently. Some good things have happened:

• We've finally had enough dry weather that the bare external walls have dried out.
• Not only this, but the dry weather has continued long enough that these outside walls can be rendered and will be pebbledashed tomorrow.
• This is good because it means (I think) that the scaffolding can finally come down and we can see our actual house again. A major breakthrough.
• A few units in the kitchen have been fitted, including the worktop with the sink (which has been mostly plumbed)
• The wrappers have come off our new cooker and it looks GREAT.
• The external doors finally arrived the right way round and have been inserted into the appropriate appertures in the house.
• With the exception of a couple of bits of "finishing off" around windows, we are now mostly plastered (and the house)
• In certain lights the ceiling in our new bedroom is now completely painted
• Our new bedroom walls are ready to have the topcoats of coloured paint applied
• So is Little Miss's bedroom
• So is the family bathroom.

All this painting (whitewash plus 1 topcoat on the bedroom & bathroom walls, whitewash plus 2 topcoats on the ceilings) has taken about 20 hours to do.

However, in a less positive mode:

• The ensuite bathroom still needs its first white topcoat before it's ready for colour (that's about 5 hours per coat)
• There are no picture rails in our bedroom or Little Miss's so we can't do any more on the walls until then.
• We've still got to paint the entire kitchen, study, utility room and cloakroom from bare plaster.
• I don't know exactly how many hours of painting are left to be done, but it's got to be 50+. I have no idea when that's going to get done.
• Oh, and let's not forget all the woodwork that needs painting (skirting boards and picture rails, when they arrive)
• The holes and cracks Paul the Builder made in the playroom wall and ceiling still need to be repaired and the ceiling is lath and plaster and will be a difficult job to fix.
• Paul the Builder asked us for some payment and I pointed out that it wasn't due until he got more stuff actually finished. When Paul the Builder realised this, he immediately stopped all work on the kitchen and threw all his work on finishing what was needed to get payment.

Worse news:

The tiling of the bathrooms hasn't even been started. The materials were bought urgently at the start of the week and we were promised that this would be done during last week so that the family bathroom, at least, would be fully ready for us to use when we moved back in on Monday. The chap who does the tiling for Paul the Builder has been on site since Wednesday, but hasn't actually been allowed to do any tiling. Instead, he's been running errands and doing odd jobs for Paul the Builder all week.

However, the worst news is this:

Throughout the week, we've been working on the understanding that Paul the Builder was finishing off all the major internal stuff this week, and over the weekend, so that it would be safe and clean for us to move back on Monday. The main thing here was plastering of the hall, landing and staircase. One of Paul the Builder's workers was even set to work on Friday (and Saturday morning) preparing the walls so they could be plastered and dry by Monday so we could be home with no chance of little hands leaving their mark in new plaster, or getting in the way generally.

Anyway, the house was crawling with two teams of plasterers all day today, doing the render, but their boss declared there was "no way on earth" that they would be able to even start the plastering inside before Monday and that it was not going to be finished before Wednesday. Apparently I'm just meant to accept this as "one of those things, mate" and get on with life as a refugee.

I really don't know what to say or do now. The urge to tell Paul the Builder to get him and his men out of our damned house and leave us alone is occasionally overwhelming.

The slightly more level-headed side of me is intending to tell Paul the Builder that he has until Wednesday (when this last plastering is done) to get the rest of the house in order and all his rubbish off my propertly and then he can clear off and stay out. This ought, at least, to get us picture rails, doors (with working handles and frames) and all the last bits of incidental plaster tidying up finished. From there, he can stick his final payment where the sun doesn't shine (and I don't mean Sheringham).

However, given that everything we've been promised so far has either taken 2-3 times as long as planned, or just simply not been done at all, I don't have much faith even in this strategy.

Frankly, from here on, it's "just" plastering and kitchen fitting to do and - bluntly - any berk picked out of Yellow Pages can do these jobs at a time of our choosing. Letting someone else do the jobs we want doing and having Paul the Builder get out of our lives and leave him free to properly concentrate on the next job (rather than having to pretend to concentrate on ours at the same time) feels quite appealing to me and possibly him too, I imagine.

However, this is just likely to delay completion even more. I am, therefore, comprehensively at a loss.

We've promised the children that they can be back at home on Monday. This won't happen. We've promised my inlaws they can have their house back on Monday. This won't happen.

At this rate the children aren't going to have a summer holiday at all. Equally, we're not going to get to go on holiday next Saturday because we won't actually be able to get back in to our house to get the things we need to pack to GO on holiday.

I don't mind saying that I've genuinely been in tears today. I'm not saying this in some 21st Century, showing-I-am-a-New-Man-and-revealing-my-vulnerable-side sort of way but because this is so damned frustrating and painful this is what it has reduced me to. I seriously hope there are no ore setbacks on this because I really don't know how I'm going to handle them.

Back to the plan

Ok, so things are looking up again. Thanks to those of you who have stuck with us so far.


Right now, we have:
* a fully plastered upstairs
* a first coat of paint on the new plaster upstairs (except for under Little Miss's window, which unaccountably will not dry).
* a fully plastered kitchen, study, utility and downstairs cloakroom
* a full set of windows
* part of a kitchen.

These are all Good Things and I am particularly excited about the kitchen finally making some progress.

On the downside:

- two of the window panes are broken
- one of them is badly scratched
- the study window is SO not what we ordered. It's coming out again and the right thing is going is.
- there should be obscured glass in the cloakroom. I don't actually want the children able to pull faces at me while I'm in there (any more than they already do)
- the back doors arrived, and had to go straight back because the hinges / handles were left-to-right reversed from what was ordered
- some of the kitchen turned up broken
- best of all, the man who spec'd the kitchen measured the plans wrong by 1cm - which translates to HALF A METRE on the ground. So we've had to lose a unit unexpectedly. Not very happy with this, I have to say.

Nonetheless, we continue to move forward. This weekend, the renderers are coming in, which means we are definitely OUT - they render by spreading mortar on the wall then chucking buckets of gravel at it. I DON'T want the children getting that idea!

Nik is also slightly calmer (see earlier post). Thanks to all who emailed to offer him counselling / support / tranquilisers / a bash on the head with a brick until it was all over.