Chaos in the House

You will be forgiven for thinking that when it comes to Chez 0ddness, Chaos is a given; part of the wood-work, part of daily life, part of the very fabric of the home.

You'd be wrong.

See, there is chaos-chaos, and there is Chaos. Obviously, I am talking of the latter. Chaos-Chaos is kids, pets, woman, housework and general shenanigans. Chaos, however, is when there are strangers in the house, power tools in the house, building, repairs and bomb-hit-it-appearances that cause me to stress out.

First off, as the wise man Hubert Farnsworth once said will say - Good News Everyone! After over seven years, we have a fence! When it first went plooey, I started chasing for it to be repaired, then it got worse, and I had to chase for it to be replaced. I was fobbed off, jerked around, lied to and generally messed around. I gave up after a while, chasing it every now and then until late last year when I finally snapped - and sent a properly shitty email to them.

Within a week, I had a case worker who was very interested in not only the fence, but any and all issues I had with the home. So I asked her for a week, and at the end of that week, she was presented with a laundry-list of every little issue I had with the place. Cracks here, peeling stuff there, missing that, broken that, and so on...

And to her credit, she did not once tell me where to stick it. She went through it all item by item, and over the last six weeks or so, I've had a bloke turning up, fixing something, buggering off, then coming back a week later, fixing something else... Over and over.

But finally, the two bigger items... The Garden Fence, and the Downstairs Banisters.

Now, as I write this, the banisters are still a work in progress - I am sitting here writing this blog post in an attempt to distract me from the sheer volumes of stress going on behind me.

The fencing, however... The fencing is done. I was so excited that it was getting done, and the weather has been so nice this week, I didn't take into account what makes Britain so... British.

The rain.

Last night, it started to rain, and carried on and off through the night, and was pissing down this morning when the contractors arrived. I have no rear access to the house, so they had to take everything they needed through the house, and were in and out as they progressed through the building. Each trip delivering more and more mud, clay, gravel and dust onto the floor. The first two hours saw the dust sheets soaked through and sort of pointless.

By about 1pm, they were done...

From this:

Guys on site

To this:

Finally, privacy! Kellie I can now sunbathe topless!

Of course, the downside to this is the mud and crap throughout the downstairs...

This is currently the state of my downstairs hallway/back room. Made worse now, by the added layer of several inches of sawdust.

And I kid you not about the sawdust. When he first started cutting up wood - on the middle-floor hallway with open banisters - it started to snow through the banisters and downstairs. And now, he's cutting wood downstairs as well...

That is just the start of Sawdust Hell 2013... It's even worse downstairs.

Of course, with all this sawdust, plus the carpenter in and out to the van still, I can't sweep/hoover/mop the downstairs. For one, he's still making more sawdust. For two, it'll just stick to the wet floor anyway. So I have to wait until he's done. Until then, he's still using his circular saw, hammer, power drill, hammering more...

It's going to take Kellie me hours to clean this mess up.

And now - the kids have started coming home.