Home Improvements 2 - The Christmas Special
So. We've ended up with a bunch of workman crawling around
inside and outside the house in the already fraught Christmas run in. With the
inevitability of Santa's once a year coming, the projects we'd foolhardily
agreed to be done in December have overrun.
Madness, I hear you say, to willingly invite in such mayhem
at this time of year. Well yes. And no.
The idea of having everything sorted by the end of the year is
seductive, but we didn’t push for this. Businesses are only happy to
overprogramme, leaving the tightest of margins. They can’t wait to get all the
filthy lucre in their mits before the break.
I ran away at the end of last week. The house was filled
with blokes spreading rubble and brick
dust far more liberally than any festive cheer. I couldn't get past the
ponderous patio man to my office and the dining room was livid with sooty wood
stove fitters. Mrs A had the back room baggsied. So I fled to the sanctuary of
the Double Six cafe on Eversholt Street, near my Camden employers to begin
scribbling this blog. I found a table in the corner, hemmed in by the very
breed of hi-vis clad fellows I was trying to escape at home.
Our current log jam began with the boiler, installed back in
November, which needed a few repeat visits by Alex to sort out various pressure
and valve issues. To be honest, I became a little sceptical about some of the
issues Mrs A was identifying. Our plumber is notoriously easy on the eye
(apparently) and I sniffed an element of "yes, that bottle on the bottom
shelf please", transplanted from the bar scenario to kitchen domesticity.
"Ooh, you've got Alex have you?" admired friends and neighbours when
Mrs A mentioned the sabotage (in my view) she was inflicting on the boiler and
the remedial action thereby required.
Installing the wood burner has been the most intense and yet
comic saga so far. Mick, the unreliable builder, has taken six visits to
complete the two-day job of enlarging the existing hole in the chimney breast to
make room for the burner. That's about forty quid's worth of sugar just for the
tea drinking.
Nevertheless, he did uncover the dining room's original fire
place behind about 10 black sack's-worth of brick infill. We were delighted
with that. Experiencing the grinding down of just 2mm of 150 year old residue
on the surface of these old bricks was a smidge less delightful. A thick, acrid
dustcloud obscured one end of the room from the other for most of Thursday.
Grit penetrated everything. It's an ingredient even Heston can’t translate to
fine dining. I checked after seeing the state of the fridge contents.
Then Kev and his Mate came to fit the boiler. Then they went
away again. They couldn't find two adjacent spaces outside the house for their
van. Mick forgot to tell us this requirement. They came back the next day. We'd
primed the neighbours this time and so were able to move cars around.
Typically, a lorry came to haul away the skip full of garden rubble (more of
this is a moment) at precisely the same instant. For about twenty minutes, the
bottom of Cross Oak Road was like a game of Parking Mania meets Ice Road
Truckers on LSD, involving one skip lorry, one 18 cwt van, two Ford Estates, three
lines of frustrated traffic and four wheelie bin place-holders. I was too busy
making rude asides to see what happened to the Partridge in the Pear Tree.
Kev and his Mate were irrepressibly cheerful. Cheeky banter
and shouty mirth.
“There’s your burner”, said Mate as he dumped the Clearview
Stoves box by the back door. “Merry Christmas” and he made to walk back to the
van. “Excellent!” I replied. “Where do we plug it in?”
Later, Kev was cleaning the chimney, pushing his rods up the
fire aperture, Dick Van Dyke style. Mate was barking instructions from the garden
at the top of his voice. “A bit more Kev! Yep, keep it coming. Give it some
oomph. More, more…” And then finally. “There she blows” as the brush popped out
of the middle pot. “It’s a boy!”
And then some frankly juvenile stuff that had Mrs A snorting.
Kev clambered onto the roof so that he could push the metal tube lining down
the shaft:
“Is it in yet?”
“It’s coming it’s coming…”
“I need more length…”
Etc after immature etc.
Mrs A, on the other hand, thought James was looking for any
excuse to take it easy. She wasn’t very sure about him at all. It probably
didn’t help that she bore the brunt of his fastidiousness on the first day.
Every few minutes there would be a little tap on the back door:
“I’m a bit nervous about the space
for the skip? Can I talk to your neighbours about moving their cars?
“Shall I write some notes to put
on the windscreens?”
“Can I tell you where I’m going to
pile up the old slabs?”
“I’ll put the new materials down
here. Is that OK? I may need to move your bins.”
“I’m just off to the loo if that’s
alright…?”
Mrs A dubbed him Twinkletoes. Irony I suspect.
Twinkletoes will be back this week. He has to fill in his
lovingly painted yellow outlines on flattened rubble with real slabs and real
concrete. There’s a more than fair chance that he’ll still be there in the
garden as we wake to open presents on the 25th. Mick is coming back
before Christmas too, armed with his big gun to seal in the granite slab under
the wood burner. We’ve reserved a Christmas dinner berth for him next to James.
But I don’t care, because the burner’s working. We’ve been
lovely and toastie all weekend. And I had a perfect excuse to go and buy an axe,
for which task I donned a thick check shirt and furry trapper hat. One has to
get the details right. No one batted an eyelid as I queued at the till with my fine
weapon, humming the Lumberjack song.
Tradesmen or no, one way or another we’ll be ready for the
big day. Family gathered around us and counting our blessings. Every one.
Season’s greeting, all.
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