Living in interesting times

Well, what an interesting day. I think it's fair to say that, no matter how prepared you think you are for the end wall of your house to be knocked down, you are never adequately prepared for it.

By mid-morning we had possibly the best ventilated loft in town, since the entire gable wall had been removed at loft level. By the end of the day, the upstairs toilet had an alarming hole in the gable wall and the spare bedroom was rather more open plan than is sensible. It would have lovely views over the adjacent field, were it not for the fact that a great big tarpaulin had been strung over the end of the house in an attempt to render us even slightly water tight.

Equally, I don't think one can ever be over prepared, mentally, for the various sounds of one's house being demolished noisily around you. Bricks landing on the ground from roof height, bits of mortar pinging off the tiles, scuttling down the roof and crashing to the floor are even more alarming than they might otherwise be when they are (formerly) parts of your own home and castle.

As if this wasn't turmoil enough, Paul the Builder also slipped casually into the conversation that the new steels (to support the new upstairs and roof) would be arriving in a few days and that we'd be "losing the end metre of the kitchen" in order that they can build the walls up to support them, in readiness for the new floors to be built.

Now, a metre might not seem like much to you, but when your kitchen starts off as, er, volumetrically challenged as ours, trust me you notice. Especially when the metre concerned is the metre that contains our fridge, our freezer, our only remaining cupboard AND our washing machine. Not good.

Suffice to say that we are reviewing our options, vis-a-vis accommodation for the next few weeks.

Today also featured a spontaneous and unexpected visit from what we first took to be two Care in the Community patients out on day release to gaze over people's fences in a mostly non-threatening way. It subsequently transpired that they were subcontractors for Three Valleys Water and had come to install our new outside stop tap. Such were their monosyllabic communication skills, we only worked it out when: a) we saw their van, which had printed (in small lettering) "Working for Three Valleys Water" and b) when they started digging around the hole in which our old stop tap lies. The assumption being that no-one would do this for fun, even if they had some mental impairment.

Anyway, this was sufficiently unexpected and unannounced that Paul the Builder and his team had to do a quick change of plan and get the other end of our new water main sorted out so that we would only have the minimal interruption to water supply. Typically, the interruption we did endure co-incided with a crushing need on my part to visit the toilet (and, inevitably, it felt like being one of those "special" visits where you want to flush immediately at the risk of getting the World Health Organisation visiting). But I digress.

Somehow it managed to take them the best part of two hours to do the simple job required. What was most worrying was the way they seemed genuinely surprised to find their hole in the ground was rapidly filling with water, once they opened up the end of the mains pipe. They were so completely unprepared that it wasn't until water was flowing down the driveway that they thought to go and connect up their pump and clear the hole again. The truly special part of this process was that they pumped the water away up hill so much of it came straight back down the drive at them again.

Still, I suppose with intellectual capacity like that it probably explains why the only job they can get is one that involves standing in cold, muddy water for most of the day trying to find, let alone fix, pipes.

Tomorrow, apparently, the rest of the gable wall comes down, so adieu bathroom. Madame is off now to have a ceremonial last bath. I'm looking forward to a last "proper" shower in the morning.

Thereafter, we think we will use my in-laws as a daycare centre for keeping the children busy after school / pre-school and for teatime and bath, then bring them home for bed. We can put the essential kitchen stuff (fridge, freezer, microwave, kettle etc) in the playroom since it's not otherwise going to be used. This'll be fine until they pull up floorboards in Little Miss's room for the new support steel, but we'll work with that.

At least we should be OK until the fatal moment comes when we have no working toilets. Then even I may get driven from the house and need to seek temporary alternate accommodations. Hurrah for wireless internets.