Building stress

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.