Someone I once knew - I think it was my ex-partner's mother, but don't hold me to that - used to say when she was flustered "Arrgh! Too many things to redo ...". If you're wondering why I've gone a bit quiet on the renovation front recently - well, that's why. Since I've been back working full-time here at Grillou I seem to have spent much of the time not doing, but re-doing. And re-doing not things that I've done myself (I'm far too tediously and anally perfectionist not to get things right at first pop), but things done (or sometimes not done) By Others: in some cases by our predecessors, in others by - well, no, let's not go there ...
And so whereas by now I should be engaged in a deep and meaningful relationship with my sewing machine, I'm still up to my armpits in things infinitely more messy. This weekend's project, for example, is replastering the two walls that butt up to the new, scarily-expensive-but-worth-it, French double doors we've just had made and installed in L'Atelier's kitchen by a local artisan. But before I can do that, I need to repair the huge holes in the plasterboard that were made in a failed attempt to repair the previous door .... When I'm not doing that I'll be on the end of my angle grinder cutting the pieces of stone mosaic that will form the border of the tiled area on L'Atelier's bathroom floor .... and when I'm not doing that I'll be working on putting together the bits of the metre-high staircase we've built to join our hallway with the new dining room.
After that, there are four Big Jobs still to contend with: one shower to tile, two floors to level and lay, and a huge cupboard to build out of reclaimed materials. And after that? Five pages of small(er) jobs, several pieces of furniture to finish restoring ... and twenty curtains to make. If it sounds daunting, it's because it is.
It's two years almost to the day that I signed the devis for the building work that would make Grillou what it (nearly) is today. A couple of weeks after that, we started preparing the ground for the builders: removing acres of old tiles, cupboards, kitchen fittings and all the rest. If someone had told me then that two years on we'd still be working ten hour days, seven days a week they'd have probably got short shrift. But it's a very common tale; we're by no means unusual, blah blah blah; and This Too Will Pass.
But do you know what would be wonderful? To be able to get up in the morning and not put on working clothes ...
2 comments:
While building our house, our tile man told us, not to stress. He said not to think of everything we had to do, but to treat our project as if we were sitting down to eat an elephant... you can only eat one bite at a time.
:-)
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