I don’t need five differently sized saucepans from Le Creuset, however lovely a wedding gift it was. I clearly don’t need a stand mixer, a juicer, and a food processor. For a family of three, you only really need four cups, maximum, and so what if two of them are mugs? In what world do we need 16 forks, 16 knives, 16 spoons, and 16 teaspoons? That’s 64 bits of cutlery cluttering up a drawer I don’t have! And when did I last have 16 people round for lunch or dinner? On the 15th of Never, that’s when. You don’t even need an oven – an air fryer really will cover most bases. And what I have mostly learned from living in half a room is that you don’t actually need all that much to live. In the words of all the best Instagram influencers, I will try to “learn” and “grow” from the experience. The lovely, non-leaking house we will have at the end of it all! The fact that the builders found that rotten bit of the roof and how grateful we are to be able to pay another £5,000 to fix it! The good fortune of only having our hot water cut off twice! The fact that we own a house at all (or part-own it, along with the bank), when there used to be a time I exclusively wrote columns about my fear of never being able to get on the property ladder! This is progress, right? R ight ? I shan’t grumble about the time I woke up in the middle of the night to find water pouring through the light fixtures and onto our bed, or the week I was knocked out with Covid and spent five days soaked in sweat, feeling as if the builders were drilling directly into my skull. I won’t groan about the music choices of the five builders we now share our home with (seriously: Michael Bolton?), or their habit of smoking in the shell of the kitchen. I won’t gripe about the not-so-fine-layer of dust that coats everything, from the floors to your hair. So don’t worry, I’m not going to spend this column moaning about how awful it is to live on a building site. This is why there are thousands and thousands of home “Reno” accounts on social media featuring “before” and “after” photos, but relatively few that show you what it was like “during”. Be gracious about the work you are having done, and acknowledge your privilege. You’ve chosen to live on a building site, unlike the neighbours, who have not chosen to live next to one. The one rule of living in a renovation project is: no whingeing. Oh no! You can’t complain about having building work done during a cost of living crisis, on account of the fact it makes you seem like a spoiled oligarch (I’m not sure any oligarchs live in south London, but you get what I’m trying to say). To be fair to them, our house definitely wins the Hallowe’en prize this year – no amount of elaborately carved pumpkins or giant spider webs draped over the front garden could compete with the notion of a family actually residing in the creepy skeleton of the falling-down house next door. “You’re living in there,” gasped a neighbour when I bumped into them the other day. It costs almost as much to hire a skip these days as it does to rent a two-bedroom flat, hence our decision to “live in” during our home renovation, much to the horror of, well, everyone. Actually, we started off living in three-quarters of a room – relatively spacious – but as our renovation project has gone on and more problems have been found in the walls of our Victorian terraced home, the space we can safely live in without getting rained on or knocked out by flying debris has got smaller and smaller, until eventually I expect we will be living in the skip outside, under some tarpaulin. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.For the past four months, my family and I have been living in half a room. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |