Transient's diary: end of the epic

Transience, as the word itself implies, comes to an end. Ours has. We’re back home, and a home transformed, if not quite as completely transformed as was planned, but more of that later.

Like all good operations – and I’m thinking of D-day, for instance, as an example of comparable scale – the enterprise got under way the day before the main action. With my impeccable sense of priorities, I wanted to make sure that the house was reconnected with phone, WiFi and, above all, a service to run both our TVs. Because we now have two TVs, but more of that later too.

So I was in the house the day before making sure that the engineer knew what to do. For instance, when I told him we wanted a TV connection in our new bedroom, on the new top floor, he did that teeth-sucking thing so many technicians like.

“Ooh, I don’t think I can do that,” he assured me with obvious satisfaction, “the only way I could get a cable in would be by drilling a hole through the window frame. It can’t come through the wall, you know, it’s covered in tiles and if I tried to drill, they'd shatter.”

“What about using that cable, then?” I asked pointing to the cable end sticking out just where we wanted the TV.

“Oh, I don’t know what that’s for. Is it for a satellite?”

“No. It’s the connection the electrician put in for us.”

“Oh! You mean got it put in special, like?” 

The tone was "why didn't you tell me before? Perhaps before getting my hopes up that I'd get away quickly?"

I showed him the other end of the cable, he tested both ends, and lo and behold, it worked. So we have the second TV.

What was good is that I also came round to feed Misty, the cat, for the last time of his cruel separation from us. I was delighted to see that he was already inside the house. He’d been outside before. So he’s mastered the new pet flap! A great relief.

I have to call it pet flap, by the way, because the girls, Luci and Toffee, think it’s a small dog flap and Misty thinks it’s a cat flap, and it doesn’t pay to put any of them out.

They were with me, by the way, the girls. Misty was delighted to see them, so the reunion went swimmingly, as they all gathered on the patio, inspecting the pet flap and each other.

A household reunited

The move itself happened the following day. Danielle realised that this was the fifth time in just seven years we’d used the same Polish removals company, such has been our sad nomadic existence since we reached Luton. This will have been the last, partly because we don’t want to keep bobbing about like that, but partly also because our Poles – the hardest-working, most skilled removals men we’ve ever worked with – have decided to go home. Ah, Brexit, Brexit: the gift that never stops costing.

The manager of the removals team agreed to put up our new bed for us (new bedroom, new bed). But then he decided that he had to go to another job. I suspect that he took a look at the flat pack kit and realised how long it was going to take. 

I didn’t.

IKEA stuff’s not that hard. It’s a bit like the model aircraft kits I used to build as a child: you take it a step at a time and follow the instructions. It’s just that with a bed it takes a tad longer.

Bed-building under way.
Why the carpet? See below

Use a carpet or it will end in tears
Who am I to query Swedish wisdom?

I bet it would have taken our Pole less time than it took me, but that still would have been a few hours. In my able hands it was a five-hour job and left me exhausted. Still, it was eventually done, meaning that we could spend our first night back in the new room, right up at the top, and wake up to a view of a clear blue sky over the tops of the houses behind us.

Satisfaction
No picture of the bed collapsed, because it hasn't. Yet.

What we weren’t able to do, through lateness and tiredness, was make use of the new TV (I told you I’d come back to it). The idea is to be able to watch TV from in bed. That means that when we’re put to sleep by some contemporary fairy tale or another – perhaps something based on the premise that, against all experience, all it takes to be a successful US president is honesty and decency, we wouldn’t have to wake up again to brush our teeth and make our way to the bedroom.

Ingenious, right? Well, we shall test it tonight.

And what about the completeness of the transformation? Well, there are a few minor bits and pieces still to deal with. Like the installation of a fire sprinkler system. The building contractor was adamant we didn’t need one. The building inspector says otherwise. So walls on which the paint has barely dried will have to be channelled out again, for electric power and water. But this time we’re not moving out.

Anyway, when was a building job ever completed without the odd hiccough and setback? Never, you tell me, and I agree. And, after all, I know that soon this too will end.

Transient's diary, weeks 11 and 12

So close and yet so far…

The house is nearly ready. The new bedroom has painted walls as well as a floor and a view.

Blue walls, wooden floors, and a view:
our bedroom just needs a bed

The new bathroom upstairs has bathroom fittings.

New bathroom looking good
If they can replace the leaky toilet
and turn the water back on

Fresh paint is on the walls of the new staircase.

Great pale green staircase
Just needs a carpet

What more could we ask for?

Well, I suppose water in the upstairs bathroom would be good. In the new shower room downstairs, too, come to that. But, hey, we’re nearly there. The stair carpet’s ordered. The new carpet for the living room has already been delivered. And the kitchen was finally finished this morning.

We’re sticking with the removal van’s arrival on Saturday, and that’s that.

Anyway, a rite of passage has occurred. For the first time since we moved out in August, the whole household gathered in the old place, indoors, in daylight, this Sunday. Ever since he’s been on his own in the place, our cat Misty has been most chary about coming indoors: it was a mess and often full of strangers, and few people are stranger than builders. He preferred to keep out of the way, hanging out, we suspect, in a neighbour’s house and only appearing at night, in the garden, when we came to feed him.

But on Sunday, the toy poodles Luci and Toffee were able to get together with him, share the joy of reunion, and start exploring the place.

Gathering of the clans.
Note the new pet flap in the background, being examined

The joy didn’t last too long for Misty. He quickly remembered why he’d always found Toffee an annoyance: she followed him everywhere, pushing him around when she could to try to get him to play with her, or smelling him in inappropriate places. Eventually he retreated behind a ladder and had to defensive action with a paw to keep her away.

Misty chastises Toffee
“Great to see you, but clear off now you irritating little tyke”

Still, at least that too is part of normal life, now close to being re-established. Indeed, it was because of normal life that we were there at all on Sunday: a house must be cleaned and when it has had builders in it for twelve weeks, it needs cleaning on a massive scale.

We were there for ten hours on Sunday (though I would slope off from time to time to walk the dogs). But for Danielle that took her total to 32 hours in three days (the first two of which, sadly, I had to be away on business. In Sicily). And we’ve had two wonderful Polish women put ten hours each. But the pace still isn’t clean.

Ah well. I’m looking forward to moving back in. But I suspect there’ll be a fair dose of purgatory mixed in with the pleasure, at least initially.

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.

Transient's diary, weeks 6 and 7

At last, it’s really happening. Things are on the up. There’s beginning to be a glimmer of a hint of a chance of a hope of a prospect of our moving back into our house before long.

The new kitchen has tiles on the floor. It has some kitchen units in place. Why, it even has a new boiler. No water to the boiler (or taps or anything else). No electricity to light the boiler. No gas to light, indeed. But, hey, that can all come in time.

A kitchen taking shape
Note the boiler. Not that it’s working yet or anything

And it’s not just in the kitchen that we have tiles. There are even tiles on the walls of the shower room, and very fine they look too. Of course, no water, electricity or, indeed, water heated by the boiler that’s not yet working either but, again, hey, we shouldn’t ask for too much too soon.

Besides, there’s no shower head.

The shower room has great tiles
Though no shower yet...

xThere’s been even more progress upstairs. The loft no longer looks like a loft at all. It’s beginning to look like a bedroom. As well as the window with its great view (well, OK, mostly of scaffolding for the moment but one can picture the view beyond it), we now have plastered walls and a proper floor.

New room emerging with a fine view of scaffolding
But – en suite doesn’t really mean a bath in a bedroom, does it?

There’s a bath too. I like to think it’s not in the right place – I don’t think ‘en suite’ means actually in the bedroom. Some time they’ll no doubt move it into the little kind of cubile they’ve fashioned next to bedroom – yes, it’s going to be more en-cubicle than en suite, but there’s no room for a real suite under our roof.

It’s all happening, though, isn’t it? The end of the vagrancy beckons. To be capped by a place I’m keener and keener to get back to…

The end is in sight.

The transient's diary, weeks 4 and 5

It seems like we hit the trough at the end of week 4.

It was already getting a bit tedious, this transient existence. Danielle and I were both feeling how pleasant it would be to be able to move home. Not Toffee and Luci, the dogs, of course. We brought our sofa with us, so with their favourite resting place, plenty to eat, and plenty of walks, they had nothing to complain about.

We, on the other hand, were running out of patience. There’s nothing wrong about our rented appointment. Well, nothing except that the pipes start moaning from time to time, for no good reason, when we’ve had the temerity to run some hot water. Nothing I can do seems to stop it – eventually it dies down like the moaning of a banished spirit – so I’ve been reduced to muttering, “oh, do shut up, you ghastly bit of plumbing”. 

Ineffective, you think? No more than anything else we’ve tried.

Still, even without that, we’d want to get home. Home’s home, after all, the place where we feel we belong. Small and modest it may be but, hey, I’m small and modest myself. Well, small anyway.

However much we miss being away, Misty, our cat, is even more fed up. Each time we show up at the old place, where we’ve left him – it seemed more humane than imposing a cat flap-less existence on him – he rebukes us loudly. I mean, he’s happy to devour the food we give him, but he makes it clear he resents our failure to remain in our home. Which is also his home.

Scarcely inhabitable

Still, at the end of week 4, the place really wouldn’t have been possible to live there. Or, if possible, certainly not desirable. Hey, the kitchen gave straight onto the garden, without so much as a door between it and the elements. And, until blocked by a sheet of plywood at night, in a gesture to security, the sitting room-as-was gave straight on the kitchen, so had the sofa been in its accustomed place, it would have been for all practical purposes, in the garden. Or at least, in an annex to it.

That was the trough though.

By the end of week 5, the change was spectacular. Why, the wall-less hole at the end of the kitchen had turned into a real wall, with a real door, and a real cat flap (well, the hole for the cat flap was there. The flat itself will come later).

A new door to lock out the garden
A broom as a sign of optimism
A massive cat flap in preparation

And upstairs, in what will in time be our bedroom, we had – a window! With a view, what is more. Or at least, there was a view until they covered the whole thing (leaks, you know: a temporary measure until they’re fixed).

The beginnings of a view

Still, it’s a huge step in the right direction.

Even so, that was the end of week 5. We’re approaching the end of week 6 now. And we were already getting fed up in week 4.

There’s no joy in vagrancy.

The transients' diary: week 3

Every day, I assure myself that the destruction has gone as far as it needs in our house, and now the process of construction can go steadily forward with no more backtracking or regression.

Then I find that something else has gone down. Or been torn up. Or ripped off.

What? What? Where's my roof? Or even my floor?

That’s not to say that there’s been no progress. There has. Things have been built in amongst the continuing demolition. It’s just that the demolition still, for the moment, seems to be outpacing the building.

Ah well, that’ll change. I know that can’t be wrong. 

Can it?

Three weeks gone now. It can’t be more than five to go – as we’ve said before, these projects complete to schedule. 

Don’t they?

In making progress, it’s curious how simple some decisions, how complex others. Not, generally, the way you might expect them to be. I’m reminded of one of the more colourful characters in Shaw’s play, You Never Can Tell, the barrister Bohun:

”… there will be no difficulty about the important questions,” he assures the other characters. “There never is. It is the trifles that will wreck you at the harbour mouth.”

So it proved this very day. A decision about putting in a new water main, ripping up more of the floor to do it? No problem. Investing more money in making sure the water gets to the different places we need it, at sufficient pressure? A few minutes discussion led to a decision to go ahead. Changing our intentions over accessories and units to make the most of that water? Easy.

No, what took the time – an hour and a half of it – was selecting a new cat flap to go in the kitchen. I pick my words with care because he gets terribly upset at any hint that he might be a little larger than he should be, so let me just say that no one would suspect him of anorexia ever. At one point, he managed to rip a cat flap right out of a door.

Well, that door’s going in the new arrangements. So, we need a new cat flap – actually, a small dog flap, as Luci and Toffee have to use it too. This one will not be in a door at all (why cut a hole in a brand new, double-glazed door?) but in the wall next to the far better door with which we’re replacing the old one. Though the construction work is going to increase the room available to us in the house a bit, space will still be at a premium. It isn’t easy to pick a cat flap that will take up a sufficiently small proportion of the wall space we can play with, but still be – again I pick my words judiciously – large enough to accommodate a cat of respectable girth.

It took me an hour and a half to solve that conundrum. To be honest, I’m still not sure the solution will work. We won’t know until the new cat flap turns up and the contractor can compare it with the space available.

As for Misty himself, he seems to be doing reasonably well. We still pop round to see him at least once a day. He’s always pleased to see us, trotting over to be stroked and mewing in loud appreciation as we go over to his shed with a packet of food to refill his bowl.

What most pleased me, though, was to find him inside the house the other day, among the building workers. We thought he was keeping well away from these strangers. But one of them explained to me that he’s taken to stroking Misty when he shows up and making sure he has access to his dry food.

So Misty has a friend and the purgatory that the project implies may have been lightened a little for him.

Good for Misty. I’m looking forward to moving back in and seeing him settle once more into his home. And, of course, use his new cat flap, making all my effort and heart ache entirely worthwhile – as I’m sure he will.

Won’t he?

The transients' diary: week 1

It all started when we decided that it would be fun to add some space to our little house, and make it slightly less little. Convert the loft, say, so that we could have three bedrooms – and, hey, luxury, two bathrooms. And how about a bigger kitchen that led straight to the garden? That could be a lot more comfortable.

It would be inconvenient, of course. There’d be noise and dust and the place would be barely inhabitable, but that seemed a price worth paying.

“Barely inhabitable?” said the contractor with what could only be described as a guffaw. “You want to stay here while we’re working? You’re kidding, right?”

“Not a good idea, you think?”

“Listen, pal.” He may not actually have said that – we are the clients, after all, and he wouldn’t be offensive – but the sneer was there by implication. “Barely inhabitable doesn’t cover the half of it. Completely uninhabitable’s a bit closer the mark. We’re going to cut off the gas and the electricity. The water too. And we’ll be working in both bedrooms. No, no, you can forget it. Out you go, I’m afraid. For two months, till we finish.”

Homeless! We’d made ourselves homeless! In pursuit of a more comfortable home.

Oh, life abounds with amusing ironies.

Barely inhabitable

Fortunately, we had friends with a flat to let. So we moved there.

So we’re in a time of transience. Which struck me as worth documenting. If only because it’s slightly different, and therefore potentially more interesting, than mere banal normality.

Oh, wow, that’s so much easier to write than to do…

It’s surprising how much less difference there is than you might imagine, between a small temporary move, and a full-scale permanent one. That’s principally because anything we weren’t taking with us had to be boxed up, or at least covered with dust sheets, if we wanted any hope of still being able to use it when we got back. As for the things we were taking, well that was just like a normal move. We used the same great Polish company we’d already used twice before since we moved to Luton (yep: we’re one just one step away from nomadic living). We prepared and boxed everything for them to take, made sure they had everything with them, and unpacked it all at the other end.

Just as big a job after a five-minute move as after a five-hour one.

The worst bit was getting the sofa up the stairs and into the living room. Both ends had to come off. And then be put back on again. But, hey, it had to be done: it’s where the dogs like to lie during the day, and they need to feel at home in the new environment. 

Don’t they?

The next day the builders moved in. And, as usual, the first step in making the place more attractive was to make it profoundly unappealing. To turn it into a disaster area, in fact.

However, and I have to admit this a perpetual source of amazement to me, within the maelstrom of destruction something constructive began to appear. Within days, a new set of steps appeared. We don’t have our new top floor yet – for the moment, we still have a loft – but we have steps up to it.

They may not go anywhere but, hey, they’re stairs

That’s progress, isn’t it?

Naturally, progress has to pause from time to time. What project doesn’t, after all? Today I learned that the scaffolders’ lorry had failed its emission tests and needed a new engine. That won’t be fitted until Tuesday, so the scaffolding won’t arrive until later next week, instead of last week as planned. But, never fear, the contractor assures me, as long as it does come by then, work can still complete within the two-month schedule.

“The timetable stays the same, does it?” I asked him.

“Oh yes, no problem,” he said, with that nonchalant tone people always adopt when they’re trying to hide the doubts that assail them.

There might be another small problem. The daughter of one of the building workers has been having seizures – “well, she has them all the time, but you know, this time she’s in hospital” – which means her Dad has had to have time off. But the contractor’s still nonchalant about things.

Worryingly nonchalant.

Meanwhile, we’re having trouble adapting to our temporary life. As she was driving us back from badminton today, I had to remind Danielle that she needed to turn left to the flat, and not go straight on to the now uninhabitable house.

“Old habits,” she said as she wrenched the wheel around to enter the side street, “they’re difficult to break.”

That’s certainly true. Later, I took the dogs for a long walk, and didn’t wake up to what I was doing on the drive back until I found myself pulling up in front of our house instead of the flat. I, of course, don’t acknowledge my faults as readily as Danielle does, so I just pretended (to the dogs and to myself, because there was nowhere else present) that I was there deliberately, preferring to park near our house rather than in any old anonymous side street near where we’re staying – though not living.

We’re now at day 6 of our temporary exile. That means there are only 56 more days to go. The plan is to be back in our place by 15 October.

I have confidence in that date. Because the contractor has told me he’ll meet it, so what grounds have I for doubt? Contractors are people for whom it is a point of pride to perform or die, to bring a project in to budget and to schedule against any odds that society or nature throws against them.

Aren’t they?

A shining window casts a light on our own existence

Two people struck me particularly when we first moved to our present house five years ago.

Right next door was the neighbour from hell. The young woman liked to organise occasional parties that lasted from about 8:00 till 11:00. That’s 8:00 in the evening until 11:00 the next morning. The parties had a well-honed internal pattern: a period of singing, laughing and general good humour; then some tears; next a row; finally, a fight with sounds of broken crockery. A brief period of silence would merely be the prelude to a repeat performance.

It made for – how shall I put this? – a certain level of unnecessary stress.

The young woman had a daughter. She was as angelic in appearance as any pretty eight-year old, and as devilish in behaviour as any inhabitant of a nightmare. Her mother was never keen on clearing up the mess after her parties, so her garden was a real treasure chest of discarded bottles, cigarette packets, to say nothing of stones and sticks.

One of the daughter’s preferred games was to collect such bits of rubbish and throw them over the fence at the back of their garden into the property behind theirs and ours. It was inhabited by a man in his eighties who took great joy in his flower beds, tending them with a care that cost him some pain: he had trouble bending down and making much in the way of serious physical effort. We would see him pottering sadly around his garden, picking up the rubbish and observing with sorrow the damage done to his flowers.

This was the second figure to strike me in our new neighbourhood. He lived behind us, but he would walk slowly around from his house and up our street, painful step by painful step, to the newsagent on the corner to buy his daily copy of the Sun newspaper. Anyone who knows the Sun, flagship of Murdoch’s British print holdings, will realise that I’m using the term ‘newspaper’ loosely. It tends to lead on stories such as the drug arrest of an anorexic fading model, the jailing of a stalker for the murder of his ex-girlfriend or any scandal or whiff of scandal that might embarrass the British Labour Party.

Still, it clearly gave our neighbour some pleasure, as did the walk to buy it, so it gave us pleasure to see him do it. We’d exchange a few words when we met him, but little more than “good morning” or “what a fine day”. But he was a fixture in our new lives and we appreciated him for that.

Eventually, by dint of constantly complaining about her to anyone we could get to listen, we were able to force the departure of our neighbour from hell. I don’t like to see anyone subject to eviction, but when it comes down to a choice between the protection of her right to behave insanely, and the need to take steps to protect our own sanity, I’m afraid I didn’t hesitate. So eventually she went.

Then one day the old man with the Sun stopped walking up our street in the morning. At first we didn’t think much of it, but when days lengthened into weeks, the suspicion began to grow that we might not be seeing him again. Ever.

A lighted window saying that people pass on

Indeed, the house fell quiet and dark, with no light showing at night. Until, one evening, I saw a window lit up again. It had fairy lights hanging above it, and it shone in blue. Not at all the taste of our old neighbour; more that of a girl growing into womanhood or possibly a young woman.

Memories flowed back of the two neighbours who had gone. And it came to me that some time we too would go, but the house would stay, as would those of both our neighbours. They’d have new inhabitants who would know little or nothing at all about those who had preceded them, and care still less. Just as little as we know or care about our own predecessors.

In time, the houses themselves would vanish. The street would remain, with new houses where ours now stand. New residents in new houses in the same street.

It takes a long time for streets to go and be replaced. But who knows what the future holds? Nothing lasts forever and eventually even the street, and the town itself, will go.

But we, like our neighbours, friendly or foul, will have disappeared far sooner, leaving no trace.

The lighted outline of a single window at night had evoked a powerful sense of the transience of our existence. We strive so hard, but in the end we’re just making a hole in the water. In no time, it seems, the water flows back in and all those things that once seemed to matter so much, matter no more.

Not a particularly sad thought, though perhaps a slightly sobering one.