Higgledy House

I love my house. When we came over from the UK in 2002, we had just sold Jon's flat in Earlsfield for a silly amount of money. In the UK it would have been swallowed up in a new mortgage, possibly for a place with two bedrooms. Here, it bought us 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 3 reception rooms, a dining room, "gym" room (sold to us as the fourth bedroom, but having no windows. Hmm), kitchen, double garage and one bed granny flat plus a pool. With a bit of work - a new ensuite bathroom, a french window and mini-stoep in our bedroom, a new picture window in the sitting room, tiling instead of carpets in the main part of the house - it was pretty much exactly what we wanted. We wandered through the rooms wondering how we would ever furnish them, let alone manage to make use of All This Space.

That was 2003. Fast forward to 2008, and we realise we have virtually no storage space. The sitting room functions as a playroom and a study combined. The kitchen is appallingly cramped when you cram two flustered adults, two small boys and a large dog into it. We still love our house, but it doesn't feel quite so huge anymore. And as we live in it, wear and tear starts to show...

One of the kitchen cupboards came off in my hands yesterday. I don't think it'll be easy to fix either. James -the-Gardener (so-called to distinguish him from James-our-son) hit the soil pipe exiting from our loo with the lawnmower a couple of weeks ago, and cracked a big hole in it. There is a new, luxuriant growth of lush green grass around it now, testimony to a rather nasty form of fertilization and standing out starkly from the drab brown dryness of the rest of the garden. About three months ago the spare loo packed up. We have had three different plumbers to it, had it jetted, rodded and had weird cement like gunk, apparently guaranteed to eat anything in its path, poured down it. Nada. The only thing that seemed to make a blind bit of difference was putting a cup of pool acid down it and leaving it there for 24 hours. It's flushing better, but we're still too scared to put any loo paper down it, so it's not as though we really have use of it, or anything.

That's just the stuff that's broken. There is so much else that needs doing! So here is my list, for posterity, of everything that I would like to do to this house. I retain the right to add to it as and when things occur to me.

Put cupboards into our bedroom. It hasn't had cupboards since we re-did the bathroom in 2003.

Paint the exterior properly, filling in little cracks etc. Have the wooden window frames
Wood Guarded.

Paint the interior all through in something like Wheaten White, with white ceilings, doors etc.

Rip out everything in the kitchen and have a completely new one installed, including a gas hob,
electric cooker and gas salamander for Jonathan.

Failing that (!), rip off the cupboard frontings and have them sanded, painted and
re-attached. Even this option is probably way out of conceivable budget range.

Put up curtains in the sitting room. It hasn't had curtains since 2003.

Install a new, energy efficient, blanketed geyser.

Get the blasted spare bathroom loo PROPERLY FIXED!!!

Get the pool cleaned up and the filter set up with a proper timer so we can run it for two hours
a day and save loads on the electricity. Also so that the frogs which have taken up residence Go
Away.

Steam clean all the carpets. Should the budget ever become available, replace the carpet in the
sitting room. After five years of a Ridgeback and three years of babies, it has a rather
unpleasant life of its own.

Steam clean the sofas. See above

I feel better just for writing it all down. Now I'm off to buy a lottery ticket.