Workmen, Grrr

Not happy today.

So many delays and I'm at what I think (though only time will tell) is the end of my tether. Let me take you through it.

1. Selling our old house was delayed. Not I think through any fault of the guy buying it but because of his pedantic, slimy father. Endless questions about (and expense due to) rights of access and change of use of a garden to a driveway.
2. Buying our new house was delayed. The delays on selling the house meant that the poor husband of the couple that owned this house died before it all went through. This was exacerbated by the fact that his wife is infirm and couldn't sign anything, so power of attorney had to be sought by one of the children. This was just tragic and impossible to feel angry about in any way.
3. All the workers were delayed. This was through no fault of their own - workers have to work and the fact that we couldn't give any of them a firm moving date meant that they all had to take on projects in the meantime. Wonder if they've finished any of them yet...?
4. The damp proofers messed up. Now we started to get angry. The sales/surveyor guy was utterly useless and so full of shit the whites of his eyes were turning brown. Big words about him knowing best followed by the slimy toad backing down and folding, followed in turn by him not actually organising the work, followed by us doing everything we possibly could to get him fired. He's not working on the project anymore ;)
5. The electricians were delayed. Waiting for the damp proofers meant that the electricians couldn't get started and had to take on more work.
6. The bathroom guy's wife was ill. Again, no fault of his own but it set the fitting of this back a week - especially galling when we'd already stripped out the bathroom and made it fairly unusable. Endless gratitude to friends of ours that put up with us turning up with towels and toiletries night after night... I've lost count of the favours we owe people.
7. Our builder went on holiday. This meant that he could only leave a few of his guys to do unskilled work and none of the stuff he'd started (such as knocking a whopping hole in one of the walls) could get finished off. Still, leaves our dogs with plenty of savoury, plaster and brick based treats to munch on.
8. Our electricians buggered off without finishing the first fix. Not only did this leave us with only rudimentary electricity, but it led to...
9. The kitchen can't be installed because the electrics aren't done. This was today's nightmare.

So here we are. Sitting in our part ruined living room. Our bathroom consists of a bath and not much else. Our kitchen is just a kitchen sink and (literally) nothing else. Our electricity comes from a temporary supply of one extension lead that trips if we switch the microwave (yum, microwave meals) and kettle on at the same time. We've got no central heating. We've got wires hanging from the ceiling. We've got plasterboard missing from the ceiling. We've got a rough hole in one wall. We've got rubble everywhere. There are channels cut in the wall where cables, sockets and switches should be. Half the render is ripped off. We've got a cement mixer in one room and an unassembled kitchen in another. The floor boards upstairs are ripped up. The floors are bare, unfinished wood, bitchemin or (in the case of our lovely living room) underlay tenaciously clinging to the floor and coming up in tiny, dust-like specs every time something brushes against it.

If we take a bath after dark we do so by gas light. Same goes for going to the loo (treacherous in the downstairs toilet where the plumber broke the seat). We sleep in the caravan (a sadly under equipped 1985 Monza - hand painted by the previous owner - a bargain at £500 fromeBayy). Our dogs (still not house trained and looking increasingly unlikely to ever be thanks to all the disruption) alternate between the beirut-style kitchen and a run outside.

This with winter approaching, no leave left at work and a wedding in South Africa to plan.

Think I'm going to start an appeal... only reliable, cheap tradesmen need apply.

Sid's fine though. He seems remarkably oblivious to all of this. As long as he's relatively warm and clean he doesn't really care.