And then we moved back out.
Easter came and went. We had lots of visitors, plenty of fun and a glut of chocolate.
The trampoline broke, the pool was pierced, the rubble pile was flattened and I got rid of some surplus furniture from my vast collection.
There are two tortoises in my greenhouse. The flies have returned and the garden looks like a bomb has hit it BUT WE ACTUALLY MANAGED TO SLEEP IN OUR FUNNY BUNGALOW!
For four nights, the Seymours were no longer troglodytes of the Shed Dwelling Era. For four nights, each child had more than three square feet of space to stretch out in. For four nights, we tried out our new life. We dipped our toes into the future, and then?
Then we moved back out again.
The Funny Little Bungalow has beds. It has walls and a roof. It has toilets. It has a kitchen. But there is one thing that The Funny Little Bungalow currently does not have at present, and that, my friends, is WiFi.
The Shed, on the other hand, has dreadful amounts of clutter and junk. It has a mere shelf to put the children on. It is decidedly jaded and needs a good clean but even it, in its rather messy, disorganised splendour, is linked to The World Wide Web.
Now, we face the rather horrid challenge of living between the two buildings. Stuff has gone up to the Funny Little Bungalow. Other stuff has not. Where are all the socks that I had put away for the new term? Mini Seymour’s mattress is missing. And Big Seymour’s work shirts seem to have lost themselves somewhere between the summer-house and the new utility room. We are currently down to two.
Number One is desperate to stay in her new bedroom, but lacks the bravado to do it alone.
No, dear readers, we are simply not yet ready to move into our new house. Not least because Sputnik has to be tamed before we can live alongside him, as he is liable to hiss at me at all hours currently. That tank has a life of its own, I swear. Anthropomorphism seemed like a good idea at the time.
It’s not all bad in The Shed, though. Aside from the WiFi, it has a fridge, which the house does not. It also has a snazzy new staircase which has replaced the metal ladder that was sellotaped to the mezzanine for two years and three days. The new staircase doubles as a play area, picnic bench and viewing area, and so, despite some initial reservations related to its bulk, I am now happy it’s there.
All this to-ing and fro-ing has had the overall effect of making me feel less like we are actually getting somewhere, and more like there is still one heck of a long way to go. In our lives, nothing ever is done and dusted. There will clearly be a slow migration back to civilisation, and I had just better accept it, rather than feeling frustrated that we can never just finish a job. Some tasks are much too big to be completed in one day, and for someone whose butterfly brain prevents me from finishing anything (take furniture-painting, for example), it’s probably for the best.
But all of Big Seymour’s chipping away over the last two years did achieve something very tangible on Sunday, when twelve humans actually sat down to eat a meal in our new kitchen. We ignored the rubble pile outside, and the lack of taps. We pretended that the worktop was not loose, and we raised a glass to what has been achieved.
We might not be finished, but two years ago we had no roof.
That surely has to be progress!
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