So: to recap. We had moved, lock stock and barrel, to a part of the world we didn’t know, full of strangers, in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave. After two weeks of us looking at the view and revelling in all the space, Mr I had gone back to work and literally the next morning, three weeks before my due date, I had driven myself 30 miles to hospital in labour and delivered our third child three weeks early, while his father sat in the sidings stranded on a stuck train, within sight of the hospital. Now we were back in the neglected pile we had bought on a mid-life crisis and a surfeit of hormones, and we had lived in the place for a while learning how it worked. Which bits got most sun? Which were the draughty rooms? (Easy: all of them but especially those facing the Urals, from where icy winds blew seemingly all year round.) Where were the biggest leaks? And while we were throwing our lives up in the air once again, willingly embracing the chaos and deliberately – to my mind – looking for trouble, were we going to go the whole hog? We knew we had to rewire and replumb, but should we go for underfloor heating, and biomass, and air or ground source – or even (Mr I’s pet hate) a turbine? These were all decisions over which we had mulled and agonised for months, and we had drawn and had redrawn the plans and budget time and time again, to the point where I had ceased to remember what the fourth iteration had been, and how it differed from this, the sixth, and was just keen to get on with it.
Which doesn’t explain why, on day one of what turned out to be Phase One, I sat with the baby on my knee in what was then the kitchen (on what we had discovered was the cold and dark side of the house) and offered to pay the builders two thirds of the sum we had agreed, to go away and forget all about it. I’ve seen all the programmes and I know that a six month project is never less than twice that, and I had survived the move, a new baby and living out of boxes and off hanging rails with sticky protective film on the carpets and so I meant it, and they knew it, but they were long enough in the tooth to ignore a ranting woman. Within a couple of hours they had blocked off one doorway and created another, and we were definitely Off. Or Under Way.
I rang Mr I, who at this stage was living in a flat in London for four nights a week, and told him it was all going to be fine. The dust wasn’t so bad, I said, and the builders were lovely chaps, and the weather was lovely so we had doors open and could get away from each other – all was good, I promised him. This was doable and it was all going to be just lovely. Ah, how the gods laughed!
