At the end of the last part, the roof trusses had arrived… Which, admittedly, is not the sort of cliff-hanger that would have kept me awake between episodes of Breaking Bad.
“OH MY GOD. WOOD!” – Emma to Me. Mockingly. Every single day.
But to us, those roof trusses were an enormous step in the right direction.
For weeks, the house had been a collection of random holes, concrete slabs, timber frames, steel beams and increasingly imaginative ways of making our money disappear.
Now, the thing was finally beginning to resemble a building.
WE HAVE A ROOF.
Actually…
WE HAVE THE WOODEN TRIANGULAR BITS THAT WILL EVENTUALLY BE A ROOF.
The roof trusses went up. We weren’t there that day, but Dad was around working on the plumbing and later informed us that Mike Dentry Carpentry had installed the lot.
By himself.
In the summer heat (remember that?).
Sweating his arse off.
This was one of those stages where the house seemed to transform almost overnight.
If you’ve been following since Making Room: Week 1, you’ll remember that the whole thing began with us starting to dismantle the roof that was already there. Then, in Week 2: The Roof Comes Off, we quite literally removed huge parts of the house. By Week 3, some men in high-vis and baseball caps were pouring concrete and apparently constructing sub-sub-floors for the sub-floors.
There had just been a lot of destruction. It felt really good to witness the opposite.
Finally.
Week nine-ish (and by this point my definition of an actual “week” had become increasingly theoretical) felt different.
We were building upwards at last! You could actually stand outside and begin to see how the extension would eventually sit against the original house.
And Christ, erm, it was huge. That mattered to me, because I never wanted it to look as though somebody had simply parked a large rectangular DIY box beside our home and called it “architecture”.
We’ve lived in a house like that before.
It fell down.
The intention was for the new part of the building to feel as though it had belonged there all along. Matching windows. Matching stone details. Matching internal finish. Rendered walls tying everything together neatly.
Of course, whether our finances would agree with such an intention or not was another matter entirely.
It all had to become a part of our home. Eventually.
And Then There Was An Upstairs…
The first-floor was down too. Floorboards glued in place over the joists, able to be stood upon.
One day you look upwards and there is sky. Then, some people arrive with timber and power tools and suddenly there is somewhere to stand.
For the first time, I could properly get a sense of the new upstairs bedroom.
About six metres long. About three metres wide. It was no longer a rectangle on a drawing.
It was a room.
Well… Currently three walls and a floor. But estate agents regularly work with less.
Then the upstairs masonry knock-through was completed, physically connecting the new part of the house with the old.
That one felt significant.
The extension wasn’t simply sitting beside our house anymore. It was becoming part of our house, and the domino effect was enormous.
The additional bedroom would finally allow us to reorganise the rest of the upstairs space. Poppy could have the larger room she actually needed. There would actually be room for her specialist equipment.
Space around her bed.
Space for her care.
Space for storage.
Space for the house to function around her, rather than constantly expecting her to function around the house.
Making Room.
Funny how often we come back to those two simple words.
Meanwhile, In Other Important Developments…
Amongst structural engineers, plasterboard, windows, chronic pain and the steady financial dismantling of our savings…
I introduced our 2 year-old to the animated and somewhat chaotic TV series, Adventure Time.
This was very important. Parents have a few select responsibilities, you see…
Feed them.
Clothe them.
Teach them right from wrong.
Stop them walking into traffic, preferably.
And introduce them to excellent cartoons.
She liked it! Excellent. Another parenting milestone complete.
There is something grounding about sitting down with a toddler watching Finn and Jake save the Candy Kingdom while, immediately outside the window, several grown men are professionally constructing another storey onto your house.
See, that’s the beautiful thing. Children don’t care about U-values or millimeters. Evie certainly didn’t care whether I had selected the correct downstairs window configuration.
She wanted cartoons.
Probably snacks.
Potentially ducks.
Definitely ducks.
And life continues.
That is something easily lost when writing about enormous family events. Nothing happens in isolation. You could be discussing one of the biggest financial decisions of your life at 2pm and cutting a banana in half at 2:07pm.
Blogs like these organise life into neat chapters. Families don’t work that way.
And while all of this was happening, another question had started taking up quite a lot of space in my head.
Could I Still Have A Career?
Work.
I was still living with my facial pain condition, and I had now accepted that there wasn’t going to be some magical moment where a doctor handed me a certificate announcing:
CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE FIXED. PLEASE RETURN TO NORMAL LIFE.
There were still appointments, medications, flare-ups and plenty of uncertainty. Some days were better than others. Some were considerably worse.
But I’d spent years building a career in policing, and I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of just hanging up my boots and walking away from it.
The question was whether there might eventually be a way back, even if it looked rather different from what I’d been doing before. And oddly enough, the extension gave me an idea.
We were adapting the house to make it work for Poppy. Could we do something similar with my own working environment?
Working from home, perhaps. Something desk-based. Somewhere I could control the temperature and lighting, both of which could aggravate my facial pain and/or migraines.
It didn’t mean I was suddenly ready to go back to work, and there was no guarantee that any of these ideas would work. But they seemed worth exploring while we had the opportunity.
So, I sat down with Emma and we started looking at the drawings again.
Could we squeeze a proper little office into the house somewhere?
The drawings had already caused enough problems, of course. Now I was voluntarily introducing another room into proceedings.
Excellent.
But perhaps there was a way to make it work. It wasn’t a solution yet. It was an option. And after everything that had happened, having another option was quite something.
I’d touched on some of that uncertainty in Hello Again, Colin. I’d spent a lot of time wondering how much of my old life I could get back.
Perhaps the better question was how to make the life we had now work just a little better for us all.
Which, come to think of it, was rather the point of this entire project.
9 weeks in now, doing the craziest thing I had done in my life: building a massive disability extension with nothing in my pocket but 50p and a thought and a prayer. But for the first time, I could see the beginnings of a possible path, and at this point, that was enough.
You see, dear reader, when you embark on something life changing you will never have the complete story laid out in front of you. But you will be able to find your way to the next step, and when you’re there you can find the step after that. You kind of know what the final goal might be, but you need to hop from rock to rock to get there.
****
SPENDING UPDATE
And now for everybody’s favourite part of this Making Room blog series: Watching the money disappear!
This week’s confirmed spending came to:
£5,968.35.
This money left my bank account all in one week.
Lovely.
A large chunk of that was the less exciting-but-essential stuff: scaffolding, insulation, plasterboard, accessibility equipment and plumbing.
These are the sort of purchases that do absolutely nothing for your Instagram feed, but are apparently quite important if you would like your house to remain standing and warm.
Here’s the damage:
– Scaffolding: £2,625.60
– Upstairs insulation and plasterboard: £1,653.26
– Ground-floor insulation: £673.06
– Provisional pipework and plumbing: £360.00
– Deposit for Poppy’s new accessible front door: £330.95
– Bluetooth ceiling speakers (for the accessible smart home setup): £239.00
– Timber/framework materials to go around the steel beam: £48.49
– A special insulation cutting saw: £23.99
– Plastic sheeting to cover up some materials or something, I don’t know I forgot: £14.00
Week 9 total: £5,968.35
Running project total: £41,015.93
Forty-one thousand f***ing pounds.
Gone.
Although “gone” is perhaps unfair. Some of it was now standing above my head.
The good news was that the spending was finally producing visible progress.
The roof structure was up.
The upstairs was taking shape.
Poppy’s new entrance was moving forward, albeit at a glacial pace.
The bad news was that nearly six thousand pounds had disappeared in a single week and most of it had been spent on things nobody visiting the finished house would ever even notice.
Which, I was rapidly discovering, is basically construction. You spend thousands on things hidden inside walls, then somebody walks into the finished room and says:
“Nice paint.”
Excellent. Still, every one of those purchases moved us another step closer to what the project was actually for. A home that worked better for Poppy, and us.
And by the end of Week 9, the next stage was staring us directly in the face.
Insulation.
Lots and lots of insulation.
God help us all.
—
If you’ve been following Making Room from the beginning, thank you. Genuinely.
What started as me recording down a disability building project has gradually become something much bigger, with lots of supportive messages and comments.
It is in effect a record of our family adapting to disability, illness, changing circumstances, disappearing bank balances, two wonderfully chaotic children and a house that periodically appears to contain more scaffolding than actual house.
If this is your first part, you can go back to Making Room: Part One and follow the whole ridiculous journey from the beginning.
And if you’ve enjoyed following us, please do subscribe your email to Mingo.Life below — or in the sidebar, depending on which device has decided it knows best where website buttons should live.
It costs nothing, and you’ll get the next part in your inbox to enjoy when it’s published.
Next time…
We attempt to insulate a house.
What could possibly go wrong ey?
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