Messy messy mess

The one thing I really dislike about having the extension done, is the ever present piles of rubbish. I can put up with the almost continuous building works, the noise and the daily home invasions (I actually quite enjoy these when they include dogs) but the growing piles of rubbish are close to insufferable.

Take the decorators. Tatt-man proudly proclaimed this afternoon that all the other trades make a huge mess and it’s only them that clean up after themselves. That’s actually not entirely true. After they left, having finished the majority of the painting (basically, only the stairs are left) they packed up their stuff from the extension, I spent quite a bit of time finding the rest of their stuff dotted around the house.

Take the carpenters. During the week, a delivery of skirting boards arrived. The lengths of timber were ridiculously long. So long, in fact, that they extended from the big windows to beyond the kitchen. This meant they could only go in the walkway, presenting a constant trip hazard. Naturally, the pile of skirting boards was reduced as they were fitted, until, by this afternoon, there was but one left. I assume this is for the bathroom. Had they thought about it, they could have cut this in half (the bathroom is very small) but, no, they just left it in the middle of the room.

The carpenters have also left numerous boxes of fixings and filler dotted around the place.

Take the plumbers. Because the bathroom is being completed in spurts, they have left boxes of various components all over the house. This is very irritating. I find myself tripping over big blue boxes whenever I try and use the upstairs rooms.

Take the tiler. Okay, the tiles need to be there as well as the adhesive and they are all in a nice neat pile by the big doors – because I put them there – but there are bags of the internal adhesive dumped in the TV zone as well as things that I have no idea about. At least Mark takes his tools with him whenever he leaves…which constitutes the bulk of his ‘stuff’.

Worst of all, take the kitchen people. Everything came in boxes. BIG boxes. And they don’t take them away. I think this should be something they offer. The boxes are useless and just take up room and collect more rubbish in them as they gradually become a fixture. Add to that the copious amounts of polystyrene and you can see what kind of pile has grown.

And off-cuts. I guess, because Lee works on his own, he can’t dispose of the bits and pieces of chipboard and wood but I do think that Optiplan could turn up afterwards and get rid of it all. In particular the giant piece of laminate which is good for nothing except maybe another laundry. It’s too thick to use for anything else. And we’ve already got a new laundry.

And the list goes on. My favourite, for want of a better word, is the microwave. No-one really knows who owns it but Clive thinks it might belong to the renderers. Seriously? They were here for just a few days, ages ago. How come our house has become a storage facility for manky cooking appliances? I don’t care who it belongs to, I just want it gone! I’m going to stick it outside and let the heavens decide whether it lives or dies.

And so, after the decorators had left today, I set to tidying up for Mirinda’s arrival. Clive had finished his bricks by about 2pm so he had an early day. (Actually, Clive never leaves much mess and what he does leave is generally in a neat pile in the back garden.) I wanted to set up the lounge in the TV zone but found it impossible. I just shifted things around, swept (gently because the skirting boards were still wet) and moved the rubbish into one pile. And I gradually grew madder as I unearthed more and more of it.

Mirinda reckons I’m grumpy because of lack of sleep and she’s probably right. Emma wakes me every day at 5am and can’t go to bed until about 11 each night. Add to that a regular early hours toilet break for Day-z and it starts to make sense why I’m grumpy.

Anyway, at the end of the day, Mirinda and I sat at the dining table and had fish and chips, chatting about the inconsiderate workers and generally delighting in the extension.