Work begins. Over the previous weekend, all sorts of "stuff" and a variety of "things" had been arriving at the house so the builders could get to work. Boards, bins and plenty of odd containers liberally splattered with cement. Most interesting of all, though, was the digger which arrived on Saturday afternoon amid a chorus of "wowee"s from the children and various belches of diesel smoke (from the digger). You can see some of them (just about) to the side of this picture.
We'd been lulled into a false sense of security through talking to Paul, the chap in charge of the team of builders. He'd told us that the way they'd be spending the first "several weeks" working on the outside of the property. This all made sense, dig the foundations, put up the new walls, get the roof sorted and make the new house from the outside, before coming indoors to knock seven bells out of the inner walls. So, we were sitting pretty, thinking that we had until at least June before we'd start to see any disruption to life inside the house.
You can see the "but" coming, can't you?
Apparently, it turns out that the little single-story bit of the house sticking out towards the camera also counts as part of the "outside of the property." No problem, you may say. Well, that little, single-story bit of the house sticking out towards the camera just happens to be our pantry. It's the only cupboard we have in the kitchen. It's where all our food is stored. and a lot of our cookware. And our bin. And our glasses. And mugs and cups.
It may be worth point out at this stage that about 50% of the reason for us having an extension in the first place was that we need a bigger kitchen. I'm not just saying that in the "oh, it would be nicer to have more space" sort of way like when people say they "need" a holiday in Mauritius. We need a bigger kitchen like Labour need not to have Comrade Brown as PM. A lot.
So, with about an hour's notice we have to empty the pantry. But where do we empty it to? Well, the rest of the kitchen is about the only starting point.Although, as you can see here, not a great end point.
Suffice to say, lunch that day was takeaway. And eaten in the playroom. We spent the afternoon scratching our heads and mourning the premature loss of our pantry, the one part of the kitchen of which we were particularly proud.
By the time tea happened (also takeaway), we'd found most of the space in the room, by the simple expedient of making hasty decisions about what stuff we would not need for the next 3-4 months, shoving that stuff in boxes and putting the 3 glasses, 2 tins of beans and jar of coffee that remained in a new wall cupboard Paul had managed to salvage from the kitchen of another house his team were removing.
I suppose you could argue that this was some life-affirming educational experience and that it would teach us valuable things about priorities in kitchen layout and design, to the ultimate benefit of our new kitchen when it finally gets built. But for now, it's not very convincing and trying to live the day on 1 coffee cup and 1 glass per person is too much of a cloud for me to appreciate the enlightenment it might be delivering.
By the end of the day, the pantry had well and truly gone. The doorway being gracefully shown off in that picture no longer had a pantry beyond it. It had a digger, plasterboard and not much else.
Now, apart from the thudding of hammers as the pantry walls came down, the day had been relatively quiet. OK, there were people pushing wheelbarrows around and talking and a radio playing the stream of power ballads that Heart FM chooses to inflict on its daytime listeners, but it didn't feel like I was living on a building site. This was, if I say so, a pleasant surprise because Paul had made not-exactly-subtle jokes about how noisy it would be and how difficult it would be for me to be in the office all day, since I work from home.
There was one rather noisy and unwelcome interruption though, if not exactly unexpected. Alan, Graham and the rest of Paul's team had been piling the rubble from the excavation outside. Very neat piling, mind, and putting it on boards to protect the grass underneath from mess. They'd also put their company sign on top of it so people would know whose it was. This, however, did not stop some trumped up little jobsworth from the council that own the land storming over to our house and shouting at us and threatening us to get it moved "or else". the history between us and Mr Jobsworth is probably enough for a blog of its own, so I'll not bore you with the details. Suffice to say the Councilllors who appointed him are looking in to the matter...
Anyway, by the end of day 1, we had no pantry and some lots of groundwork done in our garden where holes for foundations would go. All in all, a pretty productive day. Time to sit down (with some more takeaway) and collapse, ready to see what day 2 will hold.
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