Compromiscuity

Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that I’m still gorgeous. The bad news is that we won’t be building what we thought we were. The plans were not really plans as in some firm set of instructions agreed upon by all parties. They’re more of a guideline, an artist's impression of what we’ll build. Imagine going into a restaurant and ordering chicken and the waiter brings you beef. Well, it isn’t actually beef, it’s a cow. It’s a cow dressed as a chicken. In the end you’re grateful that you got something. I think that’s how we’ll end up feeling about the house.

We were there fairly early yesterday morning but found Pete the plumber and his dad rather than anyone laying bricks from Signal Construction. Pete was going to spend the week there and wanted us to make decisions about what sort of heating system we wanted, what type of radiators and where we might want them. He has a normal haircut now rather than the moptop he was sporting months ago when I met him and since that was the only characteristic I registered I really wouldn’t have recognised him had it not been for the company logo on his shirt. Everyone we meet is wearing t-shirts or polo shirts with logos on them. You don’t get them in my profession. He’s a lovely man and was good enough to make a recommendation on the heating system so that was an easy decision. No one else seems to do that. They just tell you there are 300 to choose from but give no guidance on which would be best for you. Obviously, when whatever it is is installed and completely inefficient then they’ll tell you you chose the wrong one. We left Pete to collect some bathroom catalogues Marianna wanted to show him and find a set of plans on which we could mark where we wanted the radiators. Marianna called Max about the rear walls and he called back half an hour later. He was at the house and couldn’t see any problem with the wall. We rushed back there.

He explained that he won’t be building the house as described on the plans because that refers to metres, centimetres and millimetres. He’ll be building it in bricks. His two forms of measurement are
The Brick
and
The Half Brick
It is for that reason that our doors will be smaller than we thought/wanted them to be. I don’t know why we haven’t all adopted this form of measurement.

Q. How tall are you?
A. 16 Bricks

Q. Are we there yet daddy?
A. Nearly. Only another 190,000 bricks to go

It still wasn’t clear why the holes were smaller. Why hadn’t they made them bigger and the amount of wall smaller? We went there determined to demand that he knock it down and re-build it as we wanted it and we silenced as soon as he explained the half brick/brick issue. I recognised his negotiation technique from when he and Martin met over the guttering. He doesn’t really negotiate. He just tells you the way it is and dismisses anything you might say. You feel as if you are without knowledge on not just this but all subjects and remain silent. If only it had been Matthew. He’d have knocked it down. We then did a little tour with Max. The next task was to replace the second floor dormer roof but it’s now clear that the whole thing will need to be re-built. So, he’ll scaffold above the rear extension, rebuild the dormer and install the new windows (although they won’t be as wanted them). We also discussed insulating the top floor and the loft and a few other things which we had assumed he would be doing. He kept saying “We’ll have a look at it”. I wasn’t sure if this meant “I don’t want to do it now”, “I don’t want to do it”, “Let me work out how much more that will cost” or “I’m giving you back to Matthew. You’re a pain in the arse”.

This process is just compromise after compromise. And moving further and further away from where we originally wanted to be.

Like a Chippendale

I think it was during the glorious summer of 1976 that Marianna and I began stripping the woodchip wall paper from the walls of our home. It’s what we did last weekend and what we’ve done for all of this weekend. And several dozen weekends before too. It’s been a bit of a slow news week, possibly because we aren’t living there to see everything that happens. Marianna visits regulalrly. She knows everyone by name. A few more weeks and their menstrual cycles will be synchronised. Max seems to have replaced Matthew this week. Marianna was missing him. Max called her on Tuesday afternoon to say that the makers of the windows couldn’t make them as we wanted them on the second floor and then he called her on Wednesday to ask why we hadn’t made a decision on the new design because it was slowing the project down. He was coming across as pretty pushy and impatient. Marianna thought he had stepped in because Matthew wasn’t progressing things quickly enough. Marianna almost definitely has AD/HD and declared herself bored by about midday yesterday but we carried on and returned to Vikki’s at 7.

Yesterday, from the top floor I was able to (casually) observe Martin cut his back lawn, lower the blades and cut it again and then go over it again with a strimmer. When he'd done all this he had a well deserved nap in the garden. Today he spent five hours cleaning his car. When we were in the garden this afternoon their daughter got our attention and handed over a building supplies delivery sheet that was in their garden. I thought she might have written “Help, rescue me from my OCD parents” on it. Marianna arrived at the house one day this week and caught him loitering, clearly waiting for the brickies to arrive. She ushered him away.

We sat on our deck chairs amongst the wreckage in the back garden for ten minutes this afternoon for a little lunch break. We looked at the rear of the house and noticed that it didn’t look as symmetrical as the plans intimated that it might and there seemed to be a lot more wall than we thought there would be and a lot less door. We measured and sure enough the holes for only two of the three doors are the right size but aren’t where they should be. Words fail me at the moment. We’ll have to call Matt or Max tomorrow.


Yesterday Marianna said that I have been rather cruel to Martin in these notes, that I’d held him up to ridicule and that I’ve violated his privacy. I don’t think that’s fair. I’ve portrayed him very positively and always respectfully. His privacy has never been violated. She thought that there is a risk that one of the three people that read them will declare themselves to be his cousin, sister, best friend or masseuse. What do you think?

Mr Clean

We spent the weekend stripping wallpaper. When we arrived at the house on Saturday morning Martin was cleaning and vacuuming his car. When we arrived this morning Martin was vacuuming his car and he was doing it again six hours later. Now, it may seem that I’m paying a little too much attention to him but you have to wonder why someone would spend so much time cleaning his car. The only time my vacuum cleaner and my car have come into contact in the past five years was when one drove the other to the storage unit. I feel there are several possible explanations for all of this cleaning.

A. He‘s a henpecked little man who’s so desperate to avoid his wife he’s inventing tasks outside of the house.
B. He has Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
C. Anne has Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and will only travel in a spotlessly clean vehicle.
D. He has some appalling habits which he only lets loose in the car
E. His children have some appalling habits
F. Err?

He has become a sizeable pain in the arse. Like a child who goes from one parent to the other with the same request hoping for a different answer he asks me, Marianna, Matthew, Willy, the brickies the same questions about when things will be done, how they will be done and how much of a mess we’ll make of his property. Marianna has to be kept away from him in order to avoid gaining a criminal conviction. She tried to launch a mutiny on Saturday morning and suggested that we should pay someone to strip the wallpaper. This makes good sense given the speed at which this work is progressing. I gave her permission to seek someone out but in the meantime to get back to where she was supposed to be and get scraping. Rain is forecast for the week which will slow the build down. Poo.

Is a temporary wall the same as an occasional table?

We visited the building site/house yesterday for an inspection. Marianna has been visiting regularly. I imagine her and the bricklayers braiding each others hair. Martin had called me on Tuesday and left a message requesting an exact timetable of the building work so they can book their summer holiday before or after the guttering and roof is dealt with. I told him to speak to Matthew. Just after we got to the house Anne appeared in their garden. We’d already heard her complain to Martin that he’d come home and gone straight out to work in the garden without saying hello. Our building work will be responsible for their divorce. She mentioned the timetable and said Matthew had been very vague. We told her that only he could provide an answer. Martin stropped around their garden and didn’t speak to us. Although it was only three bricks high we were initially pleased that the bricklayers had begun building the wall of the new side extension and the replaced rear extension. However, Marianna noticed that it was an inch and a half shorter than the plans and the footprint of the old extension said it should be. We’ve spent months arguing with Martin over reducing the width of the house and so we don’t want to give away the length. We decided to return first thing this morning and ask Matthew if there was a reason why we were going to have less house than we’d hoped for. So, that’s where we were at 8am. Matthew looked at the bricks, measured the plans, measured the wall, got a little annoyed and said it would have to be knocked down. We agreed and that’s what the two bricklayers began doing. I was pleased that he made no fuss at all. Well, not with us. He said that Martin had called him and he’d been intentionally vague because he thinks he’s a tool. We wandered around the house to discuss various things including windows and floorings. Matthew knows his stuff and obviously there are some things we are knowledgeable about but when he explains things I feel that we’re just a couple of monkeys playing with their own faeces.

A wall that lasted a day

The Seventh Sense

I need to tell you something about the house where we’re staying. Do you remember ‘The Sixth Sense’?, the 1999 movie in which Bruce Willis pretends to be a psychologist who doesn’t know he’s a dead psychologist (see my career summary) and Haley Joel Osment tells him ‘I see dead people’. Well, I think I have a similar power to little HJO because “I hear sex noises”. Admittedly, we’ve only been here for three days but 75% of the time that I’m in the kitchen I can hear a distant sound that I confidently believe to be the moans of a woman reaching unimaginable heights of orgasmic ecstasy. Today, I’ve been in the kitchen at 8am, 10am and 4pm and every time I’m in there I can hear it. It was the same yesterday and the day before and on Sunday evening after we moved in. There are a few possible explanations…..
1. The neighbours are at home a lot and have a lot of sex (which seems to be more than pleasant for one of them)
2. It’s not sex noises it’s the boiler/pipes/central heating/fridge
3. The neighbour is running some sort of sex chat line from her kitchen
4. I’m experiencing auditory hallucinations but instead of the voice of the devil telling me to kill myself I just hear orgasms.

What would Bruce do??

Best Before 28.06.10

On Tuesday morning when I returned by cycle after visiting the gym I was accosted by Matthew; “Can I show you some bricks?”. “Sure”. And that’s what he did. He pointed at a small pile of bricks without saying another word. Sometimes people can be a little too brief conversationally and cut too much out. After twenty years of marriage it’s fine to say “Tea?” instead of “Darling. Light of my life, fish to my ocean, butter to my bread, garlic and herb dip to my Domino Pizza. Would you care for a boiled water beverage?” but this was actually my first conversation with Matthew. I ignored the 64 variations of sarcasm that occurred to me and said “If they’re the ones you’re building it with, they’re fine”. There are a lot of decisions to make now. It suddenly seems that we’ve been fannying around for months doing research without making any decisions and it really is time we were telling Matt exactly what we want. I feel a bit of pressure because I get the impression he’ll say “We need to order doors today” rather than saying it three weeks before the ordering needs to be done. My default state is ‘Panic’.

The builders spent much of this week destroying the extension at the rear of the house. This meant that the house filled with dust and our kitchen, such as it was and always had been, could no longer be used. I realised then that I eat a lot. I start around eight and just graze all day. Without the kitchen i was staaaaaarving. I may have previously been critical of them and their presence on our road but from Wednesday onwards we were dependent on Tesco and we ate whatever they had discounted because it had reached it’s sell by date. It’s helped both of us put on a little weight.

I’m now working at a dining table in the bay window on the first floor. I have a great view of the traffic but I’m able to see how popular Willy is. A couple of times a day people will spot him and stop for a brief chat.

Matthew is developing a strong dislike for Martin. He and Willy offered to sweep dust off his patio but he wouldn’t let them cross the boundary and then Matthew found him standing on our property playing with cables that came from his house. On Friday when they had begun demolishing the old extension Martin told Matthew the bricklayer would need to consult with him about where to start building the wall (you’ll recall our discussions about how many inches we would step in). “I know where the line is” Matthew told him, apparently in a tone that had a little dash of ‘F off’ thrown in. We now know when the rear extension was built since a copy of Time magazine from 1979 was behind the bricks. Another little Time capsule from Basil. For the extension to survive 31 years is pretty impressive when it was basically a load of bricks balancing on top of the patio.

Yesterday we left the fridge/freezer on the drive to be collected by a scrap metal merchant. We’ve sold the bed on ebay. We also ended up putting a couple of chairs outside. They didn’t sell when advertised in the local paper, didn’t sell on ebay and the local recycling centre rejected them because of fire regulations. I think most of our neighbours have sold their televisions and rely on us for their entertainment after some of the adventures that we’ve played out over the months. After giving them the opportunity to watch us wrestle one of the chairs into the car, only for Marianna to return with it from the recycling centre, we then displayed them on the driveway with a ‘FREE’ sign on them. A man in his seventies (at least) appeared at the door, saying he wanted the chairs. He was carrying a bottle of wine and several minutes of tug of war followed with the man offering the bottle to Marianna and her rejecting it. I went to put shoes on since I didn’t want to expose my ‘shorts and welly boots’ combo which was ideal for wallpaper stripping to the world. We thought the old man would have waited for us but he was off up the road pushing one of the chairs, having only made the vaguest of references to where he lived. I carried the other chair and we tried to move at some speed so as to catch him up. When we turned a corner he was talking to a young man with a truck. In fact, the other chair was in the back of the truck and before any explanation of whether they knew each other or how this arrangement had come about could be given he took my chair from me and placed it on the truck. And off they went. We walked back home to the sound of neighbours previously unentertained by us cancelling SKY subscriptions and tearing up their tv licences.

It’s been an intense week and weekend with trying to empty the house completely, stripping the bloody woodchip wallpaper and putting aside things we’ll need for the next week when we’re both homeless. We’ll make a couple of trips to the storage when it opens at 8 and then it’s off to work and a week of homelessness. .

The pessimist says ‘This is awful, it couldn’t possibly be worse than this’.
‘Oh yes it could’ says the optimist

Prisioner@129

It wasn’t actually Max that arrived here just before eight on Monday but his nephew Matthew who seems to do more of the day to day managing of projects. Max is more heavily involved in playing golf on all of the courses that Warwickshire can offer. There were three or four of them, each with an assigned role. Within minutes of their arrival the garage doors (including our letter box) were in the back of their truck. It seemed that they reversed the truck into the garage and knocked the wall and roof straight into the back of the truck. It was a good method though because the wall went down quicker then a contract fellatrix in a layby. There was a man, Billy, who was in charge of swinging the sledgehammer and two others who loaded the demolished garage into the truck. I’m not saying that Marianna was wearing a bikini and wandering around with a tray of mugs of tea and biscuits but she was particularly impressed by the size of Billy’s ‘Guns’. They left part of the garage roof as a canopy for the boiler. It hadn’t really occurred to me before that our garage wall was also Martin and Anne's garden wall and so when it was knocked down they were left a little exposed. Anne complained to the builders about this so they put up a temporary chipboard fence. The wall was nine feet high and the chipboard less than four feet high which may not have completely satisfied her or ensured privacy. On the remaining garage wall were a hosepipe, telephone point, our fuses and obviously the opportunity for anyone wandering in off the street to alter the settings on the boiler. Matthew seems very competent but every time I’ve looked out of the window and caught a glimpse of him he’s looking at the plans and looking at the house in way I would look at the instructions for an MFI coffee table. During the rest of the week they drained the pond, destroyed the columns that had formed part of our pergola and filled the pond with the bricks that came from them. They had used a pump to empty the water and then lifted out the lining (with carpet underlay beneath it) and tossed the sludge onto the garden. I don’t know if they gave any thought to the dozens of froglets in there. In the frog world, on frog CNN this was 9/11. There was then a lengthy process of Willy digging channels for foundations with help from a young assistant.
We went to Porcelanosa in Shirley on Saturday and looked at their bathrooms and tiles. I think we actually made some decisions.
Yesterday a young lady brought me some chocolate cake and then began stripping. Hang on, let me start that again. For the last few weeks and months we’ve been gutting the house but the final, most laborious process is the removal of the woodchip wallpaper. It takes about two hours to strip an area a metre square. Every evening after work that's what I do. Yesterday, Marianna’s lovely friend Hannah came to visit. She passed the first test by bringing cake (chocolate. I approved) and the second by joining in with the wallpaper stripping. She was a great help but also the presence of someone else seemed to re-motivate and speed us up a bit. For some reason Martin removed the infamous guttering yesterday morning. He obviously wanted to paint the rafters on which they hang but if it rains before new guttering goes up the water will just flow into our foundations.

Marianna found a book of bawdy jokes hidden behind a section of skirting board. Basil was a weird old man.

This morning Matthew told us that the old extension at the back of the house was built without any foundations and will have to be knocked down. The other side of one wall of this is Becky’s garden wall so she’ll be as exposed as Martin and Anne. Matthew had already been to see Becky and told her and she was fine about it, of course.