Can there be anyone nicer than me?

I was chatting with my son and I tell him a story about how, in one of our many house moves, I managed to dispose of something my husband made before we got married. I'd never really liked it, it was too big and damaged and... well, you get the picture.

Filled with a rush of remorse and guilt I declare, "Oh, when you get married, make sure you choose someone nicer than your mother!"

"Easy peasy," he says, walking off with a smile.

A room with a view

At long last, we clear enough room to put the dining table with four legs on the ground. We still can't access the chairs all around it, but there is a row of three crammed between the table and the wall, more like a bench than a seating arrangement. The room is madness: filled with boxes and furniture that has not yet been taken to the right room. As the builders are still in and out of the house I have designated the utility as a space for them to leave boots and equipment and spare parts, so all the washing is hung on the other side of the table. Anywhere else and it would be filthy in seconds: here I feel I have some level of control.

There is a rare moment of wakefulness in the morning and my daughter lays the table for breakfast. She places three bowls in a row, and insists that Mummy sits next to her. My son sits on the other side, a cosy threesome in the chill morning air (we can't yet shut the window properly).

"Isn't this lovely," I say, "all three of us together."

My daughter giggles. She's delighted, cuddling up to me. There is more reluctance from my son.

"Yeah," he grunts, "and looking at Dad's underpants."

Must, must, must find alternative space for drying clothes...

Practical completion

We achieved Practical Completion last Monday ... only 3 weeks after moving in ...

During those three weeks I have had builders, of one description or another, in the house every day of the week (except Sunday: ah, the day of rest...) Practical Completion is a technical - possibly legal - term for the end of the first phase of our contract with the builders. Now the building is complete and habitable, all the jobs done and simply a minor snagging list left to do.

Logically (of course) since reaching it I have continued to have builders in every day of the week...

Outside, diggers and dumper trucks were hired to level the front garden and bring some sort of normality to the side path. In the process they have ruined the back garden, but it is hard to get too cross about it as it was always muddy and squelchy. It would be better if I didn't need wellies to hang out the washing but I guess you can't have everything!

Inside the plumbers have been busy. Or, more often, the handyman has been busy fixing the plumber's problems. The boiler/solar panel suppliers managed to flood the airing cupboard with glycol, which leaked into the toilet below. Despite everything, the relevant pipe has leaked in two places ever since: I think it got fixed a couple of days ago, but I must check! Two leaks were found under the sink in the utility, a leak behind the downstairs toilet, a leak in our en suite basin and (best of all) a leak behind our en suite toilet. That leaked down into the family room below ... another brown smudge on the pristine white walls. It was fixed late on a Thursday with 24 hours for the seal to dry. Of course, no builders are prepared to work after 4pm on a Friday so an entire weekend without the en suite (and without the kids bathroom, as that drained into the same place) followed.  Oh ... and then they didn't actually send anyone to fix it back properly until the following Wednesday: nearly a week on.

Don't think I'd recommend the plumbers.

Joiners were around for the first couple of weeks, dodging the decorator who didn't want sawdust flying around near his newly glossed doors and floors. We are still waiting on the door handles (that we could have ordered and got within 2-3 weeks but the builders said they would get ... now we are 5 weeks and counting!) The electrician finally got around to putting light bulbs in the fixings last week. He still refuses to put up the lights we bought for our en suite as he claims they are not suitable for Zone 1. That is very irritating: he does have the final say, but all the regulations are ambiguous, and as we have to have our electrics signed off it means another £150 or more to replace lights we've already bought. Grrrr...

Don't think I'd recommend the electricians either.

Yesterday the guttering was finally completed. The entire render on one wall had to be re-done, it was so poor, which delayed fixing the gutters on top. I believe we are still waiting on a dry day or two for the other two rendered walls to be repainted. Looking at the weather today, I imagine we are in for a long wait! All the rendering and re-rendering has ruined the outside paintwork, so I am going to have some upset decorators back on a subsequent dry day to redo all their hard work.

Wouldn't recommend the renderers.

To be fair, I'm not sure which, if any, of the workers we've had on site that I would recommend. They are all lovely people, but each and every item has foolish errors in it. Door handles in the wrong place, threshold strips that are cock-eyed and 10cm from the door itself. Paint all over the light switches. Gaping holes in the plasterwork between sockets. Mucky fingerprints left in wet paintwork. Erroneous nails sticking out all over the place.

I seem to have had disasters with everything. The broadband didn't work when reconnected and after a couple of hour-long phone-calls it had to be switched off and on again at their end, and miraculously things began to communicate properly. The Aga lid has a chip in the enamel. The heat recovery system is now using small grills not large ones, and there is anxiety about the false ceiling, and the hugely expensive box that makes it work was left outside in the rain by the builders. The freezer wouldn't freeze: after a week of being on it had reached about -3 degrees. (This is after I had spent a day cleaning it. It had spent the previous 6 months in the builders' container. Unfortunately, in their wisdom, they had left a half-empty pint of milk inside it back in March. It reeked! On the positive side, it shows the seals on the freezer are in good condition; on the negative ... oh, the smell, the brown dripping gunge and the general feeling of queasiness whenever the door was opened. Bleuch.)

We have reached Practical Completion, and we are practically complete. The list of 131 items that need fixing is alive and active ... but we are getting there.

(And it is gorgeous. Really. Deep down, somewhere beyond the dust and dirt.)

And then chaos reigned

On the morning of the move I prayed that there would be no rain. God answered this prayer, providing an unexpectedly warm, sunny day - except for one hour of magnificent thunderstorm whilst we were at a school meeting about our daughter's progress (Doesn't everyone squeeze in important educational meetings on the same day they move house? Really? It's another post altogether, I'm afraid.)

Yet God must have been laughing. "OK, I'll keep the rain off the move, but the payback is (a) no running water in the house by morning and (b) rain, rain, rain all night."

The running water meant we couldn't flush the loo. Again, this might have been all right if it weren't that our en suite bathroom has no door between it and our bedroom. A gentle aroma wafted through ... It also meant the children were unable to wash before the morning, so the next day started with a dash to school to use their toilets and washbasins to rinse off the previous evening's dirt.

The storms through the night would also have been fun if the builders had completed the guttering and downpipes. I was woken about 3am to the sound of dripping water and couldn't sleep for hours until it stopped. I now have an understanding of the terrors of water torture: I would have sworn to anything in order to make it cease.

Exhausted, I started the working day with a meeting about parts for the heat recovery system. In its wisdom our suppliers had decided (between our ordering and installation) not to issue certain switches any more, resulting in a bunch of useless electrical wires hanging out around the house and a cross client. Whilst the representative was explaining the alternative options to me and the architect, my architect got a phone call. The building company had decided to sack my site manager.

The day was a bit of a whirl after that. The site manager had gone off sick the day before, but came back to collect his things and say goodbye. I'd always had a good relationship with him, although I cannot deny that I was cross that the house was not completed on time. Was that his fault? I don't know. Some blame must also lie with his supervisors, who should have been monitoring and pushing in a more timely fashion. Was that a sackable offence? Perhaps. But during the day all sorts of other stories come out of the woodwork. I still don't know the truth. All I know is that I was left in the lurch.

What doesn't magically appear is a completed house. Around 3pm I asked the joiners who was in charge on site. They looked at each other and around themselves, then looked at me. "You," seemed to be the reply. No managers from the building company showed their faces all day. My architect was excellent and stayed until lunchtime, but after that I was on my own, trying to encourage the joiners, electricians, plumbers, decorators and external diggers to complete everything in some sort of logical fashion.

The kids and I ended up going for fish and chips for tea. It was a lovely, warm evening so we sat outside the shop to eat them. I dreaded going back to the chaos inside our home. At least the water problem was solved: the electrician put the pump back on. But all I could foresee was me organising the rest of the build, and I wasn't sure I'd paid all that money to a supposedly reputable building company for that to be my job.

The move - Part 2

Tuesday dawned.

I'd heard the weather report. Storms. Rain sweeping up from the south-west. The North-West was going to be wet all day. I prayed that it would be dry for my move: I didn't want mud inside my beautiful new house.

It was the standard morning routine: husband left for work at the crack of dawn; I battled to get the children up and dressed, fed and out of the house before 8.15. My friend (very tolerant of an early start) had offered to take them to school, so I could meet with the architect at the house at 8.30. In the melee of getting the kids ready I missed a call from my site manager on my mobile. I listened to it as we walked down the road.

He said that the floor was still wet: the varnish was tacky. We couldn't move in.

My home is in boxes. My children are sorted. My removal men are due. My friends are organised into helping. But my house - hallway, living room, landing and spare bedroom - are all inaccessible.

The rooms aren't the problem. The problem is the hallway and landing. Getting to site the architect and I make an assessment. Upstairs was done first, so is drier. Putting down some rolls of cardboard there it is okay. However, the plank of wood from porch to first stair, set at a jaunty angle, is no comfortable route for removal men to carry heavy beds, boxes and furniture.

The architect and I have a quiet word. If we put all the downstairs furniture into the family room (it has a French window we can bring everything through) first, perhaps the varnish will have dried. If I can delay the removal men by a couple of hours, better still. The kitchen is filthy. In a typical male fashion, the site manager has arranged for a top-to-toe clean on the Wednesday - the following day! There are piles of dust covering the kitchen. "It's clean underneath," says the site manager, helpfully whipping off some of the card that covers my precious kitchen surfaces.

The kitchen, shortly before we moved in.

Finally I glimpse what it should look like. (But he was wrong about the cleanliness.)

The site manager is deputed to find a cleaner to come and clean the kitchen, whilst I go home to finish packing. I have two friends there already, so we grab brush, mop and cleaning materials and head back to tackle the kitchen. Who needs to pack when there is little to move in to?

Cutting a long day short, I have wonderful friends and rubbish builders. The removal men finally finished putting up our bed about 8pm, as the light faded completely. The builders hadn't put light-bulbs in the sockets, so it was getting most gloomy. The only lights that worked were the ceiling spots (well, most were in the ceiling: a few hung down from wires and many were at odd angles).

As I went to get the children I delighted that we were actually in ... but knew that this was just the beginning of a long haul to get the house finished. Everywhere I looked there were errors or tweaks or simple disasters to be resolved. The electrician had left us with a few circuits working. We had no door handles and, in many cases, no locks on the doors. We were tiptoeing over cardboard runways, hoping not to damage the floor underneath. Half the house still needed to be painted and glossed. And I haven't even started on the chaos that is outside: mounds of earth and rubble, no portaloo for the workers, mud squelching a path around the building.

Still, we're in. And that's good. Right?

Yes. But discovering before we went to bed that we had no water was not so good.

The move: part 1

There's a gap in the building works - I have electricity and am (at long last) updating my blog.

Not that I've been without electricity entirely this last two weeks, though at times it has felt that way. To reassure anyone who worried when the man on the Today programme yesterday spoke about the risk of solar flares, and how one big one could destroy the world's electronic system entirely (apparently we'll have about 20 minutes warning - barely enough time to back-up!), it is possible to survive without most of what we consider 'normal'.

It's just not necessarily pleasant.

My last blog post was a gripe about deadlines. Or their ability to be missed. Our builders are still missing them, into their eighth week of overrun. Since I last wrote we have actually moved in (given the rental contract was up there was little choice!) but our belongings remain, for the most part, in boxes. Today I just had decorators; yesterday joiners and electricians; but someone to fix the mess following the plumbing leak would be useful (I'd like to use the toilet!)

All this industry for a house that was, supposedly, perfect and ready for us to move into two weeks ago. Having moved a few bits and pieces in that previous Friday we were optimistic. We popped in over the weekend a couple of times, being assured that the stained and varnished floor would be dry before we move in. I only got a little irate about finding a man kneeling on the floor with an electric saw, slicing lengths of wood, scattering sawdust everywhere, just next to my sofa. My request for a dustsheet to cover it had fallen on deaf ears.

It is never fun, moving house. I should know: we calculated that in 13 years of marriage we have moved 11 times. Too often, I say. But this is our 'forever house' - I hope - so the weekend of packing boxes, trying to keep out only the most important things, labelling everything: yes, it will all be worth it, I kept telling myself. I organised an army of girls to help me with the move, given that the builders' delay meant my husband was back at work and unable to contribute during the day. They were great, helping to finish packing at one end and unpack at the other.

At least, that was the plan. Then Tuesday happened.

Paths are never straight

We are planning a major refurbishment of our house, due to start in March.

The paths are about the only thing that are straight and are not (presently) causing problems. At the moment I am only worried about:

(a) finding somewhere to live whilst work is going on; and

(b) finding somewhere to store an extra three rooms worth of stuff for the duration; and

(c) working out how to reduce the anticipated tender price by a sum that is enough to buy an entirely new house elsewhere in the country.

The drains don't run straight. They are wonky, old, leaking and need to be repaired. Another cost to add to the refurb...

Next week the tenders come in, and then I go through them with as much hard-heartedness as I can muster to reduce the costs. Having had this great vision for the house (a sad, aged place at the moment) it is difficult to let go of the dream 'just because of money'. But, of course, there are always compromises and I refuse to be ridiculously in debt just because of our wonderful aspirations.

What saddens me most is that it is the 'green' things that are likely to be dropped. The render won't be insulating render, just ordinary stuff. The windows will only be replaced if falling apart, so we will continue to lose bucketloads of heat through the poor glazing. The plan for an air-source heat pump, which will save us money on bills in the long term, will be abandoned for an ordinary gas condensing boiler.

Instead of all these glorious, eco-friendly things, we will replace aged drains and the roof.

It is such a shame that it costs so much to be green. As the world gradually accepts how much damage we are doing to ourselves, what a shame that simple remedies are mind-bogglingly expensive. Our government (and opposition) all speak the green talk, but there is scant support for projects like ours that would actually be helping their carbon targets. At some point they will have to support the renovation and upgrade of our aging housing stock. Campaign groups like the Great British Refurb Campaign are battling to get more support. Sadly, I fear it is too late for us.

Meanwhile, please forgive me if there is a bit of blogger silence as I resolve all the housing issues. I plan to keep you updated with pictures of progress when we finally get going. Keep your fingers crossed for no more unexpected surprises.... really, I'd like a straight path - please?

Something new every day

Last week we sold our house.

Not this one - not the one with the carpets.

No, our home in London. Its final hurrah! for us was our holiday at the end of July.

Now I have to be careful - I've discovered my solicitor reads my blog. But over the years I have managed to own houses in England and Scotland (very different systems for buying/selling) and rent them, and rent from people in England, and rent in Zambia. I have had quite a lot of experience of purchase and sale, of hiccups in the system.

But this sale was the most remarkable. The day of completion of sale: the buyers' solicitor informs my solicitor that he's only just discovered that there was a mortgage involved in the purchase. No paperwork completed: no sale today, thank you.

This is when I realise the true benefits of using a solicitor when buying and selling property. (Of course, I have to say this - he's reading the post...!) He does all the legal stuff to inform them that as of 14:00 they will be breaking the contract and will have to pay interest on the outstanding amount.

Meanwhile, no doubt, our buyers are running round like headless chickens, chasing the bank, the solicitor, the mortgage provider, desperate to get the money to our solicitor. Eventually it arrived - but after 14:00 on a Friday, so that counts as Monday in legal terms, resulting in an extra three days of interest.

Thankfully for us we were not financially dependent on this: the money is earmarked for the renovation of our home here (have you seen the carpets??) - which has only got as far as finalising plans with the architect. But not completing an exchanged contract was a new problem for me. Just goes to show, even when you think nothing more could happen, something new is always around the corner.

Moving home - stressful?

I learnt today on Woman's Hour that Andy Murray has moved house this week, just ahead of Wimbledon.

Moving house is supposed to be up there in the top three or four most stressful events in one's life - together with death, divorce and the birth of a child. Thankfully it is a long time since a truly close member of my family died (my grandmother insists on keeping going, now into her 96th year!), I have not come vaguely close to divorce and I am rapidly forgetting those first traumatic years with young children.

But moving house? Something of an expert. This most recent move was the third in two years (the first of those being back to the UK from Zambia: international moves should have added weight in the stress-scale); my son goes to school boasting that this is the seventh house he's lived in - not bad, at eight years old. In honesty, his younger sister has lived in the same number!

So is it stressful? You bet! Planning the move takes months. Changing addresses is tedious (I know: we have barely started the list). And each time there is vast expense: not just for the removal company and house purchase/rental costs, but those additional bits and pieces that you just cannot live without or go missing en route.

For example, we have had to buy about another 7m of shelving for our books and belongings. We have bought quickly and cheaply (we had to unpack onto something) but will be cursing when we do the house up and plan better fitting storage space. We need a wardrobe, but are arguing over the value of buying one when we will be having a fitted wardrobe in the revised extension. Meanwhile our clothes still hang in the cardboard removal boxes.

Kirstie Allsopp stated on the radio that three moves is the equivalent of a fire. In other words, move house three times and you won't have what you started with (either from loss or destruction). We have done better than a complete inferno, although I have lost a beautiful hand-painted picture of a Chinese river scene, now under water due to the building of the Three Gorges Dam, which my father brought back from a holiday. And we have lost some important certificates - carefully kept together so we knew where they were, now we certainly know they are all lost. Picture frames have got chipped and scuffed, books have got crumpled, toys have lost important pieces. The cost of moving is high.

And all this is practical stress. This is nothing to the emotional stress of losing good friends (inevitably you keep in touch with some and lose contact forever with others, and you cannot predict who will fall into each category); nor to the exhausting process of making new ones. It is hard to go through the same small-talk again and again, hoping that this person may be the lifelong buddy that you need. It is hard to find baby sitters to trust when moving to a new place. It is difficult to break into existing social groups - not least Mums at the School Gate, but that is another blog entirely.

So I hope that Andy Murray is able to refocus for Wimbledon. No doubt he has the finance to have a lot more support around him than I have, but I wonder if he'll be dashing off to B&Q after every match in order to fix the house up. Somehow I doubt it!