Rob's Renovation Part 5 - Start as we mean to go on!

The scaffolders turned up on Monday and started putting it all up. Unfortunately they didn’t have enough on the lorry so could only do half of it and were only at the house for a couple of hours. No problem, I was quite relaxed, these things can happen and they were going to be back the next morning to finish off.

Two days later they were still not there and we hadn’t heard a thing! So theoretically we were 4 days in to the build and we were 3 and a half days behind already! It didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Thursday though the builder’s turned up, they started measuring up in earnest, ordered the materials they needed. At last the scaffolders also turned up and they have now finished and we are ready to start properly.

We have done everything that we need. The last really hot weekend that we had my wife and I spent clearing out our loft (which was nice). The local charity shops have done very well and I think we will be on first name terms with the guys at the Tip soon, we have even cleared the garden so that they can get everything up and running.

So, the builders turned up on Thursday and we took their tea orders and were pleasantly surprised. We expected, strong, white tea with about 4 sugars and Steve didn’t disappoint but James his sidekick is a whole different story. He prefers Green Tea and practises Yoga apparently, I think his calm aura could prove very useful when dealing with my wife. I am only worried that I will come home from work one day and find him giving Yoga lessons to my wife in the garden when he should be laying bricks or something.

Something I am really keen to do is to try and do a little bit of work myself, to at least say that I contributed, rather than just writing out large cheques. I am hoping to spend a few days helping out with some labouring, maybe digging some foundations or wheeling barrows of rubbish to the front…… just something to do my bit.

The only problem is that at the weekend we moved a large shrub in my back garden so that we can keep it rather than lose it in the build. I had to dig out a large root ball and this meant a couple of hours of pretty strenuous spade work. I did get a rather large blister on my thumb and it has become apparent that my pen pushing hands are not up to too much manual labour. That is something I am going to have to work on.

The builders have said that the work will take 5 months which takes up to November. We have given ourselves a bit of a contingency and said that we can go in to December if there are any major problems. We have however promised my family that we will be ready to entertain at Christmas. We might not have a table to sit at but surely the builders will have left by then?