At last!

We spent a gruelling weekend at the end of July with a rented van putting all our furniture from downstairs into self storage. The builders we had chosen built us a temporary kitchen upstairs by moving the old units upstairs into my daughter's bedroom and plumbing in the kitchen sink and our washing machine. I can't described the joy I felt the first time I did a load of washing inside the house rather than in the shed in the garden. Pure luxury! We went on holiday at the beginning of August, leaving the keys with our builders so that they could get on with the demolition while we were away.

We had a terrible crossing back from France, on one of the wettest days of a memorably wet summer, and didn't arrive home until the small hours, covered in vomit from my sea sick daughter. I'll never forget driving slowly down our road in the dark not knowing what to expect when we got to our house. It was a massive anticlimax to see the garage still standing, even though logically I knew it was unrealistic to expect it to have been spirited away in a fortnight! The next morning we could see that the builders had managed to demolish the entire rear extension and carry it out wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load through the house. There is no rear access to the garden, although we do have a side door, which is apparently the original tradesmen's entrance. (Most of the houses in the road have had these doors bricked up but we're keeping ours so we can direct undesirable visitors to it...)