I have discovered today what I am having for Christmas.
Unfortunately it is too big a present to just have then. It will not exactly be a surprise. It is happening now and I am just going to have to hope that the novelty has not worn off by Christmas morning.
I am going to have a huge mess in the living room.
Mark is doing it for me.
Whilst we were having coffee this morning he rang my brother, who is a builder, to discuss the possibility of making the doorway bigger in the back of the house to make a nicer space for the kitchen.
They talked for a while about pad stones and Acro props and steel girders and lintels.
My brother said that he would come and help.
I was pleased about this. My brother is the best builder that I know, and apart from Mark he is the only person whose judgement I would actually trust about making a hole in the side of the house.
The minor concern is that because he is a good builder he is always very busy indeed. This means that even though he might have a day or two to start on a project, he has always got so many other things to do that inevitably he has got to rush off quickly. He once had to rush off back to England leaving us with a massive hole that he and Mark had made in the roof of our French house. This was all right because Mark knew perfectly well how to put a window in it, but we had to be jolly quick before it rained.
We are going to have a sunny kitchen where the living room is now, opening on to the conservatory.
Eventually, that is. There is a lot of rubble to flow under the bridge before the dawning of that glorious morning.
Ted sent a message to say that the radios they are installing had not yet turned up. He has had to order them from somewhere else, so they are not going to install any more broadband until Thursday.
Obviously we need the rural broadband money very badly, but we did not in the least mind not having it, because of kitchens and mess in the living room.
Mark went off to take some more kitchen out of the holiday village, and Oliver and I started to take down the boot cupboard.
We are going to have to rebuild this somewhere else, the amount of stuff that has been hauled out of it has completely filled Lucy’s bedroom. I had not realised how many times every day I go in there for things, or what a useful cupboard it is. Dozens of coats and hats and bags and pairs of shoes lived in there, along with my soap making oils and some of Mark’s soldering projects, and lots of other things that I do not exactly want to throw away, but can’t quite think of what to keep them for. There is a pair of tiny clogs made by Mark’s grandfather, and a teapot that is only big enough for one cup of tea, a pretty vase which is unfortunately too wide at the neck so that all of the flowers fall over and a tea tin for which I don’t have any spare tea.
We put them all back in the box and took them up the stairs to Lucy’s room.
We faffed about for ages unscrewing bits of it, until Mark came back and took the rest of the shelves out with a crowbar.
The wall is still there but all of the shelves are gone. Well, they are not gone, exactly, they are in a pile in the middle of the living room floor.
The mess is beginning to take shape.
After that we all went together to the holiday village to collect come kitchen things that were too awkward for Mark to manage on his own.
We filled both cars with box-shaped kitchen units.
When we got back we emptied Mark’s car and then Mark went back to take out a bathroom whilst Oliver and I emptied my car.
This turned out to be harder than it looked.
It was quite easy loading things into the taxis when one of us was Mark. When that part of the equation was missing it became almost impossible to solve.
The units in my car were heavy ones full of drawers.
Oliver and I strained to lift them over the sill and then had to shove them back.
Oliver is entertaining company when you are doing things together. By the third lifting attempt we were laughing so hard that we could hardly stand up, and there was no point in even trying to get the kitchen units out any more. Indeed, we had to stop and dive into the house to visit the bathrooms before anybody leaked.
In the end we remembered the wheelbarrow and somehow managed to drag the units into that. We staggered up the garden path, the wheelbarrow weaving rather unsteadily, until eventually we managed to tip them out into the huge stack of kitchen units we now have in the greenhouse.
It is going to be a lovely Christmas.
