Below Belief

The building project continues.. It’s surprisingly stressful.
It’s stressful for a number of reasons:
Liaising with the builders themselves – nothing is written down and sometimes they don’t turn up. We are at their mercy. Mind you if they don’t show up, they don’t get paid, so this works reasonably well.
Working with the neighbours. Our neighbours are great, but we have to take them into consideration. When we tell them our monstrous extension is going to block their natural light forever. And our builders drop bricks in their garden. They have to sign pieces of paper which mean we get to pay for surveyors to survey their houses and put right any damage after we’re done. That feels like signing a blank cheque at the moment.
Mostly it’s stressful because of all the decisions we have to make, really quickly, which totally affect how our house turns out. We’ve never spent a night under it’s roof and yet decisions we make will affect how we will live there for the next few years. What if we make a terrible mistake which means something really annoys us after we move in? What if we miss a really cool use of a space we didn’t think of?
The best we can do is imagine and plan, draw and re-draw, browse the many beautiful catalogues of things to have around the house and dream of when it will be finished and we can decide if we got it right.

There’s a few more photos from Murray’s naming ceremony here.

Rob, who fancied our grosvenorgardens.com “apparition” can now see the gory details of this ginger minger. What do you reckon?

Where we stay a drunken evening listening to live jazz

Back from holiday and note all the action is going on at www.grosvenorgardens.com where we’re two weeks into the building project now and the house looks quite a bit different.
The main problem so far has been the builders have been far too keen – working 7 days a week in their “demolition” of the property and annoying the neighbours with the noise. Since we need these neighbours to sign our important 3rd party wall agreement, this is not the start we were looking for – and now have to come back from holiday and sweeten them up with presents from Sicily.
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And so our week of holiday draws to a close, fortunately one of those weeks which feels like a year so distant are memories from home.
We found the people of Sicily uniformly friendly and welcoming of our attempts to speak rudimentory Italian. And having lived with them in a tiny village, hopefully we’ve seen a homely side to them you wouldn’t get in a big city.