Happy New Year!
I’m starting to emerge from the “what day is it” and “I’ll just eat this chocolate so that no one else is tempted to”phase that has been the last couple of weeks.
After successfully finishing what we could in the house before Christmas, Mr T and I then escaped to the countryside with some friends to welcome in 2014 and with that brings on the look back of what happened in the Teaspoon House in 2013…
January & February
These months were mostly spent waiting to hear if we had planning permission or not.
At this point in the year it was mostly a big fat NO.
I distracted myself from the thoughts of living in a house with a bathroomkitchen forever by making stuff out of air drying clay.
March
Still no permission granted so Mr T and I focussed our attentions on chocolate, as you do, and made easter eggs.
It turns out it’s actually quite difficult.
April
PERMISSION GRANTED – whoo hoo.
Then the people who look after all the water needed to spend some time deciding if we could build near their pipes.
This took a while.
May
In May, I ran 5k for the first time.
and then again a few more times.
Go me!
June & July
After two years of waiting, a digger rocked up and dug the foundations for the new bathroom.
The weather was good and building was happening.
August
We spent most of August waiting for windows to arrive.
A lesson we learnt here is that when you are told something will take 6-8 weeks to be made and arrive at your house, that really means 10-12 weeks.
If you’re lucky.
September
We ran away from the window-less house for a couple of weeks and when we came back – we had windows!
October & November
These were tough months.
Darker days were drawing in and we spent huge amounts of time painting new plaster, hoovering dust away and wiping dust away*
*repeat this activity everyday for what you think will be everyday for the rest of your days.
Oh yes, and the back wall of the house fell down but was rebuilt in a flash.
There was also a bit of time when we had no roof, bathroom or kitchen as the wall between the old kitchenbathroom was knocked down and we started to wonder what on earth we were doing buying a house with a bathroomkitchen and then trying to build a bathroom on a triangle piece of land.
Happy times were spent staying with friends in Barcelona and Cambridge and pretending we were not doing any of the above.
Then there were better days when there was much less dust, the roof was put back on and the hope of a new world where we had a kitchen with no bath in it, was much more realistic.
December
Joy to the World
The dust has (mostly) gone
And we have a new bathroooooom
and kitchen.
It’s a bit weird to think that a year later, we have a kitchen and bathroom that we can use that are not in the same room.
We of course, still have some bits to do and the study room that is underneath the bathroom is currently an empty cavan and then there’s making the spare bedroom into a spare bedroom and not a room solely dedicated to storing pots of paint which is its current role, but not one that I think, meets its full potential.
So those are next.
And I hope you’ll join me for the adventure.
