I’m sitting in the only space in the house that isn’t either covered in dust or stacked with furniture… another renovation day dawns!

Why is it that however modestly your building project begins, it will inevitably grow legs and morph itself into a full blown construction job? And not only will it go on far longer than predicted, it will also come with a hefty price tag.

In early January we set out to make a few improvements to one half of the house… two months on and I’ve just sat down after loading up scraps of carpet into five bin liners. I’m sitting down because I’m not attracted by the next job, which involves lugging each of the bags to the garage through the Devon drizzle. So, instead I’m playing on my phone.. very “millennial” I know!

This building lark should be very familiar to me after many years working on a number of building projects both in our own homes and more recently in the homes of our children.
So, what have I learned?

Concrete burns are a thing. After a session mixing concrete on a hot day a couple of years ago, part of my over enthusiastic shovel fulls into the bucket must have slid down the inside of my wellies, below my cut offs. Several hours later I discovered a red patch on my leg that started to blister… long story, but I ended up with quite a serious concrete burn which took some time to heal and was quite painful. It turns out the burning chemical in concrete goes on working – eating into your skin – unless it’s rinsed off quickly. So beware!

Bricklaying is an art. During Easter 2020 while many of us enjoyed the sunshine amidst the first pandemic lockdown, our daughter-in-law taught herself how to build a wall, to finish off their house extension which had been started a few months earlier. Her self-taught skills left us all in awe – because it wasn’t an ordinary wall. The completed stepped back design, specified by our architect son, in traditional London stock bricks, is a work of art. And still standing!

Plumbing can be fun. One of our very dearest friends is a plumber who mixes his work with fun. When he visited us for various plumbing jobs he used to create musical instruments from left over copper pipes for the children to play with during his tea break. My own forays into plumbing began in 2020 assisting with the first London house renovation/rebuild. A couple of years on I had a chance to see if I’d remembered the skills I’d picked up, working on another house renovation, this time with our youngest son and his wife. Whether it was laying plastic pipes up walls or under floorboards, attempting to straighten the bendy tubes without kinking them, labelling hot and cold and fitting valves and stoppers – it was fiddly and sometimes frustrating. But it also had its funny moments – if you didn’t laugh you’d cry… In the end it was quite satisfying to think that we had laid the pipes and when the real plumber came to test the system they didn’t leak!

And then there’s the dust. Dust gets everywhere, even in the rooms you’ve sealed off. Also it lives forever. A few days after you’ve cleaned everywhere thoroughly, you wake up to find more has landed overnight, covering everything with a white film. This time I had forgotten the dust. Perhaps I just wanted to blank it out, thinking it will be less this time, as it’s in the other half of the house and there’s a big door between us… but it is back. Dust on the tables, on the cups on the shelf, even on the hoover, and it goes on. Even if you cover everything with dust sheets or polythene, it finds a way in. There is no escaping it, so if you are embarking on a building project it might be time to embrace the dusty look and think of desert storms and living in shades of grey for a while.

Although I have been a concrete mixer, a plumber’s mate, a roof resin mixer and a wall insulation fitter in the past – I am now mostly a cleaner and a decorator. These are lower risk roles, but ones which have a degree of satisfaction for a few hours at least. 

My dream is to see all the building materials packed away, furniture unstacked and being able to clean and decorate the new rooms at last, so that we can welcome some guests. 

Knowing how things go, it may be a few weeks yet, so I will slide on my “ear defenders” and get back to sweeping up another dusty room, with dreams of Spring and potting out flowers to drown out the noise of the drills and electric saws.