Four Strings Good..: Now for some decorating...

People say the three most stressful things in life are getting married, moving house, or someone dying. Well, I didn't find getting married too stressful - did I?
I've moved literally several dozen times in my life. I've had 25 addresses in as many years.. and I lived at the last place for a decade. Moving house is stressful because of all the other people involved in it.
This time moving wasn't stressful because of the move itself: that went pretty much like clockwork. It was all the repairs and the renovation..THAT was a nightmare.

Take the front bedroom upstairs, for example. Rain had been leaking in for YEARS. When we peeled off the wallpaper all the plaster fell off too. We decided to re-wire, re-plaster and just get to the bottom of what turned out to be a very serious case of neglect.

In the kitchen we took out a chimney breast where an Aga had once been, shifted the boiler -
shifted everything in fact - and redesigned the rectangular space in a sort of U-shape.
This needed all kinds of supports, steel inserts and structural calculations by an engineer after the boys had made short work of the chimney breast with a sledgehammer.

The dust was gritty, dirty stuff that gets into your skin and grinds away. Before long we were all showing skin problems - me especially.

My skin was just splitting open, especially on my fingers. I did a gig around this time and during the soundcheck my fingers started to crack and bleed while I was playing.Yuk.

While we had the sledgehammer out we also converted a double window into a double door at the back of the house.. a few strokes is all that's needed.

While the khaki was awful and condemned anyway, we didn't expect the plaster on either side of the wall to collapse when we removed bathroom tiles and wallpaper. But it did.

Plaster board is wonderful stuff, you know.

All this is happening while we're trying to live and work in this house and while Martins is starting at a new school! Yeah, and it's pouring down with rain every day for ten weeks and the bill is going up and up and up....

We made Martins' bedroom a priority so he could settle down quickly in the new house, and a generous application of plaster board, laminate floor and Manchester City-coloured paint has given him a bedroom any teenager would surely be proud of.

And we called a halt in time for Christmas so we could enjoy a happy time in our new home....