living in chaos

I thought I would allow a peek at the absurd maddening chaos we are living in right now. We are still cooking on the hot plate in the bedroom and I think I am losing my cool. To calm the sturm and drang inside me, I paint two red pictures, one entitled Tools of the Trade, and another just a dark brooding picture showing how helpless I feel. The tools are everywhere; thousands of them. Manu and his team seem to have other fish to fry and they work only when they feel like it! There are lists and lists of tasks to be done before the kitchen comes in. The kitchen is supposed to arrive in 8 days, and is supposed to be built in and ready for use before 2 weeks are over. How am I to manage the stress? My other half is cool and calm and ever so collected!

But, we have no idea what has to be done first. Put the floor in before the kitchen? Put the floor in afterwards? When do you treat the floor? How long does it take to dry? Can you cook in the new kitchen if the floor is not in or not treated yet? What about the five thousands books? How do you move them off the floor when you have to place the new floorboards? When do you build the bookshelf? Where do you put the furniture while you place the floorboards? As it is, there is stuff everywhere and we have to by necessity LIVE in the house while building. I do not recommend it.

I remind myself that we have no tsunami here.

close but not close enough

In the corner of the wine-shop-to-be, we are letting the moinslong stones show; this is a type of natural sandstone from this area used hundreds of years ago. The wineshop needs loads of work yet, and I am more impatient than the cheeky snowbells in the courtyard, peeking through the building rubble with real attitude!

where old meets new

slowly life returns

Sunday at home where we make a list of the  ten thousand things yet to be done. But we take a moment to smell the coffee and watch the agapanthas grow. In the plant pots on the right are the bulbs smuggled in from Africa. They will eventually brighten up the courtyard which is still covered in building rubble. The patience required could well fill the universe.

morning at the window

This morning before I hit the road in the direction of school, I thought about Eliot’s poem Morning at the Window. I looked out over my townscape, my new vista. A smile emerged, then hovered all day. 
This evening my morning smile has not vanished as I check the edge of the street, the passers-by, the level of the roofs, a corner of the courtyard below. Another 3 weeks at least before we can inhabit the new space.  How much longer can I wait?

there is hope yet

I came back to considerable progress... some of the plastering has been done inside. I was away for two weeks in sunny Africa and it seems that Manu and his team got some work done while I was away. My other half has exerted himself and built in the electrical plugs I ordered, and in the right places too! If the outside temperatures were not so cold, we could already have slow-cooked pois-chiche at the round table. Alas, there is more cold coming and the heating will not be installed till next winter.

skylights are in