Chaos

[anteros_lmc]

Apologies for being rather absent or late. This is why...



We're doing some major building work on the house at the moment and we've reached the stage where the entire ground floor is a building site. Every waking moment seems to be taken up with pricing kitchens, flooring, fireplaces, work surfaces, etc, etc and trying to decide which walls to knock down, and which to leave up. Meanwhile work continues to be stupidly busy and I have had to shift my "office" (table, chair and laptop) into the same spare room that daughter is currently sleeping in. It's chaos!

I'm also having to restrain partner from getting carried away when it comes to buying flooring. He has a thing about parquet you see. Yesterday he discovered someone selling reclaimed parquet flooring form the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland for £15 per square metre. Sounded like a bargain until we were told that the cost to renovate it, lay it, polish it and varnish it would come in at about £145 per square metre. Erm...no.

ETA Message from dear nodbear who it dealing with her own chaos this weekend after having had many of her precious books damaged by water :( It's always miserable to loose books so send her consoling hugs and kind thoughts.

Comments

[mylodon.livejournal.com]

You have my every sympathy. All I can say is that it will get better. Honest.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Sympathy greatly appreciated. I think we've just reached the "Why the hell did we ever start this ?!" stage.

[katriona-s.livejournal.com]

Good luck! You have my heartfelt sympathies!!

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Thank you. We're just trying to grin and bear it. It would have been much easier if we could have moved out while the building work is going on, but alas that wasn't an option.

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

I remember ages ago, looking up about parquet flooring specific to Scotland. I wanted to have Archie dreaming about the flooring of his childhood.

I think you are wise to make your house bigger while your daughter is still relatively small. She is only going to get bigger, and she, her friends, and their attendant clutter will take up a lot of space.

I am sorry for the disruption to you though.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

I wanted to have Archie dreaming about the flooring of his childhood.
I can't remember what the floors are like at Culzean, but I'm sure there will be parquet somewhere. There is certainly a splendid banister, perfect for small children to slide down ;)

She is only going to get bigger, and she, her friends, and their attendant clutter will take up a lot of space.
Tell me about it! Toots has had to move into the attic room while the building work is going on. It happens to be the biggest bedroom in the house and I can see we are going to have a devil of a job getting her out of it again!

[rum-inspector.livejournal.com]

and parquet... it is great, if you can bear that it will not look good for long! If you can bear with the dents, stains and marks, go for it... I do miss the real wood planks I had in last apartment, but I do not miss the splinters that old, not taken care of wooden floor sometimes gave.

But if you like the "clean" look, my parents renovated their 100 years old home with laminate flooring on the more "walked on" rooms like halls, kitchen and living room, easy to do yourself (well unless you have really crooked base to set it), cheap yet if you find the perfect laminate, it looks like real wood - what they got looks a lot like dark parquet, but can handle so much more stress.
(I don't know if you like computer games, but I've found Sims to help when deciding home decor :P it's so much easier to move virtual furniture around your virtual house before moving actual things)

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Very wise advice indeed! I used to own an old tenement flat, we renovated the original floors and they looked beautiful but they required a lot of maintenance and splintered easily. Before my daughter was born we covered them with modern wood laminate as we didn't fancy picking splinters out of her wee knees :} This time we have decided to go for engineered beech wood.

I don't know if you like computer games, but I've found Sims to help when deciding home decor :P
Partner got a hold of an interior design app for the iPad and spent weeks twiddling around with different arrangements of doors, walls and furniture!

[vespican.livejournal.com]

They are renovating one of the locker rooms at work. The overall appearance is close to what you show here... only a lot more cluttered.
Dave

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Oh there's plenty of clutter here too, it's all upstairs! :} It's got even worse since I posted this pic, a few more bits of wall have come down, though to be fair to the builders, everything is bang on schedule.

[vespican.livejournal.com]

Seems that jobs like this keep getting more cluttered as time goes on. Then one day, almost as if by magic, the destruction stops and things start to come together again.
Dave

[amaraal.livejournal.com]

OMG! *crosses fingers nobody gets hurt* :) Shall we send some handsome sailors over for help? Thinking of you and dear nodbear... Water is fine to sail on, but flooding books... Argh!
Have a nice Sunday though!

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

*crosses fingers nobody gets hurt*
I think the main danger is extreme stress! :}

Shall we send some handsome sailors over for help?
Oh yes! Please do :) One can never have too many handsome sailors to hand. So to speak... ;)

[donnaimmaculata.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, this looks like fun. If it all gets too much, get yourself some Archie and Horatio, they'll help you keep your pecker up. Good luck for the endeavour and may it be over soon!

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

This is very sensible advice indeed. When it all gets to much I retreat to the bath with a glass of wine and H/A fanfic :)

[nodbear.livejournal.com]

Sorry to be a week late but you know I have been thinking of you
strange to see the old dining room gone- some serious scholarship has gone in there together with some serious red wine consumption inter alia
my main worry is whether you are going to have enough walls left to shelve books on :)

meanwhile I might post an update on the Great Book Deluge now mercifully all cleaned up but with many volumes utterly unusable and having had to be thrown away:(

it will be an interesting process though to see what I can't do without from among the lost books.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

That's a lot of work you're having done.