With two months to fill in and grandchildren busy at school (except for the newest of course) he had this clever thought: "Why not, just knock off all the big hard things that remain to be done on the house. What can possibly go wrong?”
Thus it was that while one of us busied herself with the tasks that come with being the grandmother of a newborn, the other resumed his position with hammer and render and waterproofing compound and shovel and saw. According to the plan, six or seven weeks of solid work after the birth of the new grandson would leave a few weeks of gentle re-shuffling of tools and equipment to ready the floor for its timber cladding when we returned home later in the year.
Then the wheels fell off. Jude arrived early, the tiler finished early, so early that the timber floor people had a sniff of a chance of getting done before our next departure, Mat was looking for a few weeks work and a new, in retrospect quite stupidly optimistic plan was hatched.
By working just a bit too hard for just a bit too long, we had a chance of getting the whole catastrophe to within a whisker of done. So it came to be that the downstairs bathroom is complete, the laundry operational, the tiling to outdoor areas and garage done, the roof to the back verandah on, the pergolas and trellises are finished, the garage and workshop is lined in its oh so effete lime washed ply, even the shed for the dust extractor is out of the way. It only had to be done so that we could evacuate by the Wednesday before we left, so that the timber floors downstairs could be finished too.
By Friday morning, with a week to go, if we could compress three weeks of work moving all the stuff from the garage and workshop back out of the living area into just Sunday, all would work out just fine.
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