Where I left it, the plan was to move back into our house on September 7. Needless to say, that didn't happen. There was some miscommunication which resulted in the plasterer starting two weeks late, which delayed everything else. (Apart from the flooring—for reasons unknown, the builder decided to go ahead and lay the flooring before the plaster and paint. As you can imagine, the new flooring looked like shit when we moved in. Thankfully, most of it came up.)
So our build that was ahead of schedule was suddenly two weeks behind schedule and we were in a blind panic to find some place to live. A friend who was heading to Israel offered us her studio flat for three weeks, another friend offered to host our son and a third friend offered to host our daughter. (She was supposed to be on placement in Gisborne for seven weeks but at the least minute she cancelled it, and then left it to us to find her a place to live. Shis is 22.)
The fixtures finally arrived but it turned out the builder was only interested in the bath, and only because we'd designed the bathroom to the exact width of the bath. He built the bath wall parallel to the hallway, and he built the bedroom wall parallel to the outside wall, so both of those rooms are perfect rectangles. However, we later discovered where those walls intersected – in the en suite – was not square! (When I was measuring the existing rooms, it looked like the hallway was narrower at one end, but I thought I was doing something wrong. I now realise it was because the walls weren't parallel.)
The rest of the fixtures went in the garage, and it was so packed when you opened the door it was just a wall of stuff. We even had to store our bikes elsewhere.
Meanwhile, we started getting nasty emails from our neighbour. The house is actually the rear-unit of a townhouse (or "semi-detached" if you're from the UK) with a shared drive and two garages in between the two. The shared drive is quite small and I'd assumed there was no way to get a car in the garage. I even told the neighbours before we moved in we were going to park our HV on the drive so we could charge it. They did not say anything at the time.
It turns out they normally do keep their car in the garage, but at the time I spoke to them they were storing some stuff for a friend, and so weren't using it. Once the friend collected his stuff, they wanted the drive clear; otherwise they couldn't angle the car into the garage. Except at that point, the renovations had started and the builders were using the drive as a tip/work area. Hence the emails. Unfortunately for her, I have a long history of ignoring people who are complaining, so I didn't respond, which obviously made her even angrier.
We told the builder we had to move again on the 22nd, and to his credit he made a big push to try and get everything finished. Unfortunately this meant that the painter, plumber, electrician and builder were all trying to work on the same day. We stopped by in the morning and they had so many questions, and needed lots of little things (like door knobs) that we ended up spending the entire day with them, adding to the body count. However, by the end of the day everything was looking pretty good so we...moved to another friend's house.
The areas that were renovated looked good but the rest of the house was a disaster. The plasterers, in particular, had sanded down the walls without any protection, and there was plaster dust everywhere. (Funny story, my wife complained and the next day they had taped up sheets to stop more dust. Why they didn't think to do that in the first place is beyond me.) We spent an entire day cleaning the house, and by "we" I mean my wife, son and someone we hired. The two daughters made themselves scarce. Our son just focused on his room because he was desperate to move back, while my wife tackled the rest of the house and I...did other stuff. (Stuff that was important for moving in, like installing toilet roll holders, to be fair.)
It was also Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. My wife was leading two of the services so she took the day before to prepare for that, while I went to the house to do the last final bits to get it ready for move-in...and then got distracted and painted the hallway. Or more specifically, half the hallway. The other half had been part of the renovation and been painted, while the other half was wallpaper. The painter wanted $5000 to strip the wallpaper, smooth the walls and then paint, which was simply not in the budget. Instead, I painted over the wallpaper, which doesn't look great but is good enough. At some point in the distant future, we'll look at stripping the walls, but right now that's not even in the top 10 list of things the house needs.
After Yom Kippur we started shifting things back to our house and finally moved home...into our old bedroom. We'd just spent a lot of money creating a new master bedroom with en suite, but we couldn't move in because our bed was too big. Our sleigh bed is 2.6 meters and the new bedroom is 2.8 meters, so there was only 20cm (about 8 inches) to squeeze past the bed to get to the en suite! The answer was to buy another bed frame, but I wasn't willing to buy new and my wife didn't like any of the used ones we saw,, so we were stuck. However, the day after we moved in, we found a bed on Trademe (New Zealand's answer to eBay) that she liked and we could afford, so we bought it. The only problem is it's in Hamilton, about a six-hour drive away, so that's a project for next weekend.
We moved out on 2 August and moved back on 29 September, so it was like a very expensive holiday, except we didn't go anywhere or see anything. We moved four times (five if you include moving home), almost separated once (that's kind of my thing) and didn't enjoy a single minute of it. While we were in town, living on our own in a studio with a barely-functional kitchen, we thought we'd at least get to experience Wellington's nightlife, but instead we were just fighting all the time. And in the end, we don't have a flash, fabulous space; we just have a functional space. But we are quite happy with how it came out, and we've turned what was effectively a 2 bed/1 bath (with a study and extra toilet) into a proper 3 bed/2 bath home, so I have to believe we've increased the house value significantly. (But don't tell the local council, as they'll just increase the property tax...)
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