Now that the school holidays are over (hurrah!!!) and our stress levels are returning to almost normal levels, I thought we should challenge the whole family by extending our house. OK – not quite true – the whole thing has taken about a year to mull over, design and plan but it would appear the time is now upon us to go for it.
My first thought is – ‘Yay – finally we are going to extend and FINALLY have some room! (and more than 2 cupboards in the entire house!)- Yay, Yay, YAY!
My second thought is “Are you MAD???? WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU THINKING???!!
When the costs came back we looked around for another house but – nope. Nothing even remotely suitable within our suburb. And no winning Lottery ticket forgotten in my wallet (darn it) so no point looking closer to the city. Oh, and we have a great local school sorted out for the rapidly approaching 5th birthdays, so – extending it is!
At this point I think it fair to mention all three boys LOVE builders. And diggers. And mud. Actually, anything even remotely related to dirt or construction. The twins were swinging hammers like seasoned professionals by the time they were three. (Mostly because the hours of whingeing, wailing and begging outside the shed where the hammers were stored eventually wore Daddy down). But they are pretty good now and can whack in the odd nail. And hammer the odd inappropriate surface (but that’s another story).
The best thing they have built was a walk- the-plank plank, hammered (with a mere two nails) into the top of an outside wooden storage seat/box that sits on our deck. The whole ensemble resulted in a metre long drop to the grass below, so not all bad, but not great when I caught them trying to get the (then) 18 month old to walk it for testing purposes. Never good.
In summary, we can pretty much guarantee that there is going to be a whole lot of builder watching going on in these here parts in the very near future. And a whole lot of attempts to be really, really involved.
For this reason, we are building a large (read impenetrable) fence half way down the garden with a design brief that it must meet the can-only-be–scaled-by-ninjas test. If this was not the brief, I can, pretty much, guarantee there would be a couple of 4 year olds imbedded in the concrete slab at the end of concrete pouring day, the thought of which I am not even going to entertain.
We are also considering running screaming from the building and staying elsewhere throughout, BUT – oh so sadly – the budget is short by about – ooh – ten thousand dollars. Hate that.
So – wish us luck! As the builder said to us yesterday, ‘ Clients’ generally can’t wait for us to start but after a month they are wishing us gone’. I think he may be right 
