Home Remodeling

Week 18

The floor layers were due to start this week – they called to postpone till next week because they are running behind with their current project.

Why do builders always underestimate the time a project needs? They come up with a timetable, but don’t even consider the possibility of things going wrong or getting delayed. At the end of a project they are surprised or blame external factors – never themselves. They never admit that they are behind with work, because they have installed things incorrectly or sourced the wrong products, or have been sitting around drinking tea… Oh, no -it’s always someone or something else’s fault. They should allow for hitches – in every project there’re bound to be snags..

Anyway, we, of course, prepared the floor for them and removed the laminated floor planks and the underlay. We also cleared the space and brought upstairs dozens of sacks of wood tiles. They are old, reclaimed Mahuhu parquet pieces from the Tate & Lyle factory in East London. They look very dirty – covered in bitumen & glue and it appears some vinyl flooring must have been glued on the top. I hope it wasn’t a big mistake getting reclaimed flooring – right now I can’t imagine our floor ever looking gorgeous.

We still don’t have any water in the kitchen, although we sorted out the plumbing for the taps, the dishwasher and the washing machine. We might install these because we decided not to continue the floor under the units along one side of the walls. I wanted to have legs rather than a skirting, because this would create an illusion of more space.  But the built-in dishwasher and the fridge have to stand on their own platforms so a kicker is needed to unify the appliances and the units.

The wall units are arriving this week – well, supposedly! But, if they do, we can start putting them together and install the wall of units. Apparently the doors will not arrive until the end of September.

So, here we are again – delayed by yet another week. When is this going to end?  It’s now summer – I need a vacation but more importantly I need to have a home!

I’m now getting very tired of the waiting, the hassles, then more waiting … more hassles – they seem to be never ending