purple palace progress

The work on the Lavender Loveshack continues apace.  There's been promises of being done with the painting by Christmas, but that's contingent on the weather continuing to play ball.

The builders will probably be glad to be done - P had a session pointing out a bunch of shonky repairs last weekend that remain uncorrected and I gave one of them a hell of a fright earlier this week.  I don't usually get home until the builders have left, but I'd had a ride and got home not too far off 5.30.  The front door was open and I could hear banging and sanding down the right hand side of the house. I was busting to use the loo, so I didn't walk round to say hi.  I hustled into the bathroom and when I popped out, the builder's son was at the kitchen sink having a drink.*  I swear his feet left the ground he got such a fright - he garbled an apology, I laughed and said of course he could help himself to water and he scurried outside to recover his composure, the poor thing.

With all the prep work and the patches of primed new weatherboards, the Palace is not very Purple any more.  I'm nervous about the colours I've picked going up (what if I haaaaaate them?  I'm not very good with this sort of thing).  I'm also nervous about the expense, both of the current work and what we have planned next.  We're going to re-line our bedroom and install a built-in wardrobe as the first task in the New Year, followed by a similar job on the spare bedroom (we can only do this one room at a time, you see, because we can only store one extra room's furniture at a time and still have a place to sleep that isn't the living room floor.  I'm not opposed to the living room floor, I should point out, but P isn't too keen.  He's got a point because the living room is very compact.) 

We've acknowledged to ourselves that we can't afford to do the extension/kitchen/bathroom renovations as yet, so we'll stick to whacking in a dishwasher in those zones, once the bedrooms are done.  Sweet, sweet dishwasher, I cannot wait to meet you.

There's also been talk of underhouse excavations and moving the laundry to a concreted space under there.  I don't think there's any point until we do the major works at the back, and we'll still have to walk outdoors to put on a load of laundry, even if it's under the house.  The washing machine presently lives in a utility shed in the backyard, which doesn't bother me nearly as much as I thought it would.  We don't own a dryer so everything goes outdoors on the line anyway, we don't hear the noise, and the lack of overhead lighting restricts my laundry days to the weekend, so I don't have a horrible constant pile of folding to do.

So, we're going to be pouring some $$$ directly into the house, rather than continuing to shove it all onto the mortgage in the name of reducing the ridiculous mound of debt.  I know that it technically increases our equity as well, but I have a cheap wee heart and it certainly doesn't reduce our interest payments! 

That is all very domestic and dull, but it's what's going on just now. 

*You might recall that our bathroom comes off the kitchen, part of a standard 50s lean-to addition to the old cottage.  Just charming.