After the builders

So here we are: the Builders finished On Friday, leaving us with the strong smell of paint and shoulder deep in boxes to unpack back into their contents' ordained places. I had the first two weeks of the building work off, and Joseph had their final week off: my, what a lot of incidental little jobs you find that you'd better deal with in the wake of builders doing the big work. What difference has the work made? First effect of the insulation that we've noticed is how much quieter it makes the front of the house -- we see cars drive by, but no longer hear them through the walls. We haven't yet been able to see what difference the insulation makes to temperatures inside: true, we had a run of chilly days, but we kept windows open to let out the paint smell, and now that we can breathe inside with windows shut, the weather's gone mild again. But even so, I think those rooms that didn't have a brisk gale blowing through them felt kinda cosier, with no clues as to outside temperature striking through the brick of the walls. We'll find out as winter sets in.

During yesterday's rain, which flooded various parts of the country and stopped us heading off to Colchester to see Roman re-enactments among the genuine Roman ruins, we were able to admire the raindrops plonking onto the new glass roof outside the kitchen door and running off to end up in our new slim-line mini water-butt (100 litre). Our big job yesterday was taking up the old bathroom carpet, which used to be cream but caught the black dust that came down when the old ceiling collapsed, JN used it as a template to cut the new carpet (of a shade called porcelain, but pretty much the same cream) to size. One of our two DIY encylopedias gave detailed instructions for the laying of foam carpets: put down underlay of strong brown paper or similar (most of the old paper layer was still intact enough to re-use); put double-sided tape around the edge of the room and fixtures. We got that far on Sunday: this evening we tackle laying the carpet and securing its edges on the double-sided tape. Meanwhile, most of the kitchen is now back in place -- except that we need to re-paint gloss white a set of shelves which now looks yellowed against the spanking clean new white walls. So the two (or is it three?) boxes of stuff to go back on it remain piled up in the living room behind the TV. So do half a dazen boxes of my clothes, which can't be sorted back onto built-in wardrobe shelves until JN has sawed off the end of each shelf the 20mm now occupied by insulating sempatap.

The new roofed over back passageway (porch? loggia?) is jam-packed with stuff to be sorted into some sort of order. Some of it is rubbish, to be thrown into the back of the municipal dust-cart tomorrow morning (but will we be able to hear it so we can make sure it does get taken away?) Some of it should get decoratively arranged onto the folding white-covered wire grill greenhouse shelves currently leaning against the dining room sideboard, once JN has performed the miracle of the electric drill and rawl plugs to mar the pristine whiteness of our new boundary wall. And I need to re-glue tesserae into the mosaic splashback I made to go above the washbasin in the bathroom, which has been painted a bit more insistently aqua than it used to be. Apart from that, almost back to normal.