Barbeque

You could be forgiven for thinking that we'd downed tools and cranked up the barbeque for the hell of it this afternoon - everyone knows we're closet Australians and today's Sydney blue sky was reason enough to chuck on some lovely yabbies.

In fact, the barbeque was going all afternoon in our new utility room in a desperate attempt to warm the house and persuade the plaster to dry before the kitchen is fitted next week, which isn't quite the lifestyle I had mind when we bought it. The fitters arrive on Thursday and we were no closer to getting the utility painted this morning than we were when it was plastered earlier in the week. As if that wasn't comical enough, we had the patio heater running in the living room and a hastily-purchased fan heater iin the playroom (which also stubbornly refuses to dry; the entire house is laughing in the face of our flooring deadlines).

It's been a busy week, punctuated by a nasty bout of vertigo, which I get whenever I have even the slightest of colds and makes me feel as though I'm permanently off balance. Vertigo knocks your vestibular system, but it also tends to alter some of your other senses, in my case leaving me freaked out by noises and busy environments and feeling as though I can't make decisions, which is exactly what I don't need at the moment.

There have been no photographs of the house this week because plastering makes for rubbish photographs and there's not much to say about it except that I feel sorry for anyone who works with plaster or anyone else who washes their dirty overalls because it's bloody awful stuff and it's now found its way into every nook and cranny you can imagine in the house. By Thursday the whole house was replastered, the effect of which was masses of condensation building up with no escape route other than to drip menacingly down the windows and their handles. The inside of the house is so humid that wooden furniture has swollen and the front door can now only be slammed shut via the letter box and only provided there's a big bloke on site to do it. The radiators are hanging on the walls but there's no boiler.

On Thursday we received a call from our site manager to say that our oak frame had arrived for the porch and that a person had also arrived to varnish it if we could simply decide on a colour, which was impossible because (a) we hadn't seen the frame and (b) we hadn't seen the choice of varnish. I suspect we now have a reputation for being 'fussy' but since the frame cost over £2000 there was no way I was choosing a varnish at random because it would almost certainly have turned out in 'vile orange' like the front door did when I treated that. In fact, the frame is really beautiful and we're absolutely thrilled with it (it's in two parts; you can see the top half of it sitting on the floor in the second photograph). All it needed was a clear varnish, which is exactly what the front door will now need to ensure it matches.

On Friday we took delivery of our sanitary ware, which includes a 'comfort height' toilet, which is much taller than your common-or-garden loo and lends itself to a more enjoyable toiletting experience, or at least, that's what Alan the Pan told me in the bathroom shop and who am I to argue? I shall be reporting back with toilet comparisons before the end of the month. We also took delivery of a lovely new slate house sign to replace the one that read 'The Croft', which was carted off on a skip last week.

Later in the morning we met with the kitchen designers again to look at the final details - things like what colour you want the insides of your cupboards and what sort of distance you want between the worktops (I think the standard is 120cm but you'd need another 20cm to allow for my hips alone). We ordered a stainless steel bracket to hang the quartz worktop in the en-suite bathroom (£275 for goodness sake!) and visited Steve the Gripper, who's carpet shop is so disorganised that I wonder how he manages to sell any actual carpet. Steve the gripper has a retired fitter who's quoting for our flooring. We had gone to the local carpet shop, where we've also bought our bathroom fittings, but their idea of 'looking after us' was to throw in a few free gripper rods for the stairs so we've gone looking for creative alternatives.

By Friday afternoon I was dizzy and sick, which wasn't helped by a trip up the M6 to look at the colour palette for tyrolean render - the plasterer is due to render the house and he swore blind that tyrolean render came in two colours, 'white' and 'cream.' Futher investigation revealed it came in about 15 colours and we eventually chose 'ivory' which you might think is unecessary detail but if you don't get the detail right, why bother renovating houses? Anyway, we've sourced cheap bags of the stuff and the man in the shop has told us it needs to be laid at least 5mm in thickness to avoid the plaster showing through. so now we're tyrolean experts extraordinare and I'll be out in the mud with my flaming ruler making sure it's the right thickness.

After the visit to the tyrolean there was a brief interlude in which Dr B met the electricians to discuss siting of the cooker hood in relation to floor joists and I got on with more important things like hoofing round John Lewis, where I made a total arse of myself by having mis-read the price of my curtain fabric and dissolving into a puddle when the lady totted up the bill and told me the living room curtain fabric would cost £950 and not the £600 I had accounted for. I even made her ring it through the till twice and check on ther website, but of course she was right and I was wrong, which meant I had to put it back and spend money on brushed chrome toilet roll holders instead, just so I didn't leave looking any worse. By Saturday afternoon I was trogging round Simon Boyd's fabric shop in Knutsford, which only confirmed my suspicion that there is not another fabric in this whole world that will match Crown Paint's 'Corset' beside the £950 stuff in John Lewis and with Linda the curtain lady on speed dial, I now have to find that money in the budget by hook or by crook.

Today we asked my in-laws to watch the children so we could paint the kitchen. My in-laws only babysit in 5 hour time slots and they wanted us home by 5pm so it was a good thing we'd bought one of those paint pod things (using the money we got for weighing in the copper pipes). I have a feeling I'm never going to want to paint another wall as long as I live. One room down, 14 to go.