This morning I found an onion. Well, what had once been an onion, if I’m honest. It had wedged itself inside the top of the hoover’s stupid hose thing and hidden there while putrefaction set in. It’s understandable, in a way. Here we are, knee-deep in sawdust and removing mouse entrails from under the table saw, and it’s week two (or three, I forget) of the kitchen-building extravaganza. I would quite like to hide in the hoover while putrefaction sets in. I’m trying to be all stoic and British about it, but sometimes it’s a bit challenging, if I’m honest. We’ve been living in a house which many would consider fairly buggered for about five years now, and while the new extension has meant lots of bits which were very revolting met their timely demise, its construction has also introduced levels of chaos which we’d never encountered with the old, known-if-revolting-quantity version.

Of course, when you decide to self-build an extension which, when finished, accounts for forty per cent of your whole house, you sort of cast aside minor considerations like, oh, spare time, and surfaces which aren’t covered in debris of some sort, and that happy (if unrecognised) time when you weren’t familiar with the entire Screwfix catalogue. The old extension was tiny, damp, freezing, and covered in mould. The new kitchen is fifteen by seventeen-odd feet, with a notch of about, er, bathroom doorway size. (I am not a surveyor. Dimensions do not always come easily to me, and Quercus is on the ginger wine, so any estimate/memory he might offer will have been pleasantly eroded by this stage.) The old bathroom was five feet square, while the new one is about seven by nine-and-a-bit feet, and it has built-in storage galore, so that’s the empty space I’m quoting, not the space into which one fits the usual crud encountered in bathrooms. We have a lot more space, and a lot more sense of space, courtesy of the high ceiling that having a single-storey extension – the roof-line of which is just under the second-storey thatch – creates.

The thing is, though, that when you’re living in the place that you’re renovating, it’s a bit of a bastard keeping a sense of it being your home as well as a site. If we could just bugger off and live in another house while doing this one, it would be so much simpler, not least because the rest of our house is pretty tiny (our sitting room, for example, is about twelve by nine feet, and it’s the biggest room in the original house, while the dining room is about eight by nine, with the understairs cupboard taken out of that). Instead, the entire house gets routinely coated in the dust which one or other of the many processes involved in replacing the old, the buggered, the just abysmally manky. First, there was the dust of taking off old render and exposing cob walls which hadn’t seen the light of day for probably fifty years. No – wait. First there was the dust which knocking out the ghastly fireplace created. From a foot-square aperture to the inglenook which now houses our woodstove, via several tons of dust, debris, and old render (sensing a pattern?), we decided that going back to the original opening would not only give us more space (it’s not useful space, but in a house where every space has to be used, in the normal way of things, for built-in cupboards and innovative storage solutions designed to mitigate the sense of smallness that one otherwise encounters, some useless space is actually a luxury), but would create a fireplace worth really getting to know, rather than one which was just functional.

So, that was dusty. Re-rendering was, well, a post in its own right, as I’ve already written below. Building the extension wasn’t dusty so much as being quite interesting with a tiny baby; I think back to this time last year, when the tiny daughter and I were hopping in the bath with no walls between us and the kitchen and no back door. Oh, and when the walls were all studwork and this interesting green plasticky stuff which acts as a vapour barrier in timber-frame builds. And now we’re into the bit where Quercus is spending every spare minute machining wood and working out joints and whatnot, and I’m sort of faffing about with a duster from time to time while looking mildly distressed and noting the mould on the windowsills which is there, I think, largely because we can’t easily reach said windowsills to clean them, and the building isn’t really getting what one might describe as normal use, because we can’t open windows (see aforementioned reaching issues), and about two-thirds of the entire space is taken up with tools or materials. (Currently, getting to the sort-of-installed sink involves climbingto one side and then cautiously stepping around a pile of oak planks about twelve feet long and three feet tall, before navigating the perils of the sticky-outy corners of the table saw.) The kitchen, as in the functional part in which we prepare food, consists of a four-foot re-used worktop from the old extension propped up on chipboard; the two-ring Baby Belling Of Woe lives on one end, and underneath is a riot of cat food, poultry supplies, vegetables and goats’ milk, together with the (useless and ridiculously loud, and that was before the onion moved in) hoover and sundry things which have yet to find a permanent home. We have one – admittedly large – cupboard for storing food, crockery, pans and cleaning stuff. It’s bedlam in there, and I try to avoid ever looking in the very bottom part of it, because if I were a creature with lots of legs and a worrying tendency to click upon moving, that is where I would be, for sure.

I know one has a natural tendency to think that the proverbial grass – in this case, the day when we finish this house – is greener, and that if one can just get on to The Next Bit, life will suddenly become simple, straightforward, rewarding and purposeful, but sometimes I do think that surely, life must be simpler than this when you’re just not doing work on your house all the time. I’d just like a year or so, after this bit, of Just Living. Doing things like planting the garden up again. Growing veggies. Being worried when we forget to water the tomatoes. Maybe even ironing. (Actually, no. No. Sorry. What was I thinking?) You know, just normal, ordinary stuff. Not even the fun stuff. (Because in fairness, we do have a lot of fun, and I’m sure that we not only went round twice in the queue for our allocation, but maybe even beat a few people up and stole their quotas too when it comes to laughing.) Oh, for the day when this bit is finished. Keep your fingers crossed, folks – the plan is to try to get the kitchen units built and the new oven installed by Christmas (which would be just as well on two fronts: first, the roast dinner I misguidedly undertook on Saturday took THREE FECKING HOURS TO COOK, and second, the very lovely electrical superstore from which we bought our cooker wrote to us this morning to alert us to the fact that our year’s guarantee is about to expire. As we’ve yet to see if the fucker even works, it’d probably be a good idea to find out while it’s under warranty, non?). If so, I shall celebrate with a veritable orgy of cooking. If not, I shall do something involving ginger wine, tried patience, and that fucking Baby Belling, I daresay.