Transient's diary, weeks 9 and 10

It may be time to start counting differently. To think “day -12” rather than “week 10”. Our transience is really feeling transient now. Why, we’ve gone so far as to book a removals lorry to get us back, for a week next Friday. We were promised completion by last Friday, but OK, we never really expected that target to be hit. In the end, we’ll be moving back a couple of weeks late. 

What’s more, the project’s a few thousand over budget, but hey, we got a lot more done than we were planning.

Like new floors everywhere. That wasn’t in the original plan, which was a mistake. A design flaw, you might say, not to design for replacing the floor. Now that’s done. The guys even fixed the squeaky floorboard by the door, which turned out to be a squeaky floor joist, which turned out to need one of them to climb down into a gap where he could barely breathe and do whatever you have to do when you replace a squeaky joist by one that doesn’t squeak any more.

Before you become casually judgemental about my utter inability to explain any of the things that they were doing, let me just point out that I’ve made quite a lot of progress in the course of this whole business. If nothing else, I now have some idea what the difference between a joist and a beam is, even if I still don’t know how to fix one. Either one.

Love the green. Shame a lot of the dark shade will be covered by our couch
Sorry – Luci and Toffee the dogs' couch. And the cat Misty's

As well as floors, we now have newly-painted walls. In tasteful colours, too: none of your “white with a touch of primrose” or “white with a touch of sea spray” or what have you. These are proper colours. It means that when people come and stay with us, we’ll be able to say “shall we put them in the brown room or the claret room?” like the gentry of yesteryear. It’ll still be the front room or the back room, but it sounds so much better, doesn’t it?

One of the nice things about the claret room, incidentally, is that it’s the room where we keep our wine – so it’ll contain claret as well as being painted claret (note to self: go out and buy some more claret). That might make it not the best room for our more bibulous friends; or perhaps, on the contrary, absolutely the best.

The other good thing about the colours is the clever strategy we adopted for choosing them. Danielle picks them. She asks me whether I like them. I tell her “yes”, and we’re all happy.

The kitchen’s nearly done now. We actually have water there, and with proper pressure. It was worth having the road coned off again and again for two or three weeks while the water company made up its mind to come and do the work. Well worth it, I say, though I’m not sure the neighbours agree.

Units, sink, stove, tiles, a door - even a cat flap (small-dog flap)
See it down there to the left of the door?

As well as water, we have a stove and an oven and tiles and units and a door to the garden and – I can just picture the delight of the animals – a small dog/large cat flap too. Everything’s really coming together.

That includes our new bedroom. Blue paint on the walls. A lovely view from the wide window, with no scaffolding to block it (did I mention the scaffolding had gone?) and delicate led lights in the ceiling. Which are on all the time, as it happens, since the switch, although firmly installed, doesn’t actually have any effect on the lights. But, you know, an electrician must be allowed the occasional mistake, and he’s superbly qualified to fix it.

The bedroom's starting to look like one. With a view on more than scaffolding
And notice the led lights - permanently on for the moment

We’re looking forward to getting there. In less than a fortnight. My only regret is that the flat we’re renting has one of those pay-as-you-go metres for gas. I put a lot too much money on it. It’s all very well keeping the heating on as much of the time as possible but this is turning out to be a mild autumn, and there’s only so much sweltering we can stand.

Oh well, I suppose leaving rather more gas credit to our successors than I planned, is a price worth paying for getting back home as soon as possible.

I’m looking forward to it. Impatiently.