Delayed gratification

So with our undertaker in the house and almost all the apparent changes his work it would seem fair to conclude we are sitting in the garden enjoying the recent sunshine. But it’s not the case. While we’ve been in the garden plenty, there has been little sitting.

It might not be clear from photos, but the garden around the house originally started off like this:

Getting rid of these should be simple.

Surrounded by overgrown evil thorn trees.

In order that our undertaker could demolish the lean-to, we cut them all down in a rush. Problem is we ended up with this:

Bushes and lean to down..

But OK, gettting rid of this might be more complex.

So we’ve spent a lot of time recently cutting big sprawling thorny branches into small pieces to put in sacks and take to the dump. Oh the joy. Did I mention the evil thorns?

Rack em and stack em.

Who'd have thunk it? Belgium has dumps too. The things you discover while renovating...

This has been accompanied by the scrubbing of the previously de-wallpapered walls with lessive St Marc (like sugar soap in the UK) to remove the remaining paste. Particularly painful and demotivating, but if we don’t do it now we’ll no doubt hear about it from our undertaker when he does some plastering, or indeed curse ourselves if it’s us– and easier to do it now before we have fully cut walls and live electricity.

Filthy pasted walls

Painfully scrubbed wall

Then there’s been the old 5m2 kitchen.  Removing cabinets (dead rats included) and fake walls to find immovable vinyl wallpaper underneath. Ugh.

From this...

To dead rats

To dead rats in the bin and a mopped floor

to vinyl wallpaper hidden behnind the fake wall. Arrrgh!

And finally there’s also been a last minute trip to this place to pick up what you see in the trunk.

Much brico is sold here.

Radiators come in boxes. Who'd have thunk it.

The company was discontinuing some of the radiators we’d chosen so I made a mad dash to just beyond Lille to pick them up before it was too late. Bonus was they were half price, and being in France they were already half the Belgian price before the further 50% discount so well worth it (I loves me a bargain). Not to mention it meant we didn’t have to go back to the drawing board. We’ll come back to the materials dilemma in the later post, for now lets just say you’d need very deep pockets to buy everything in Belgium.

Delayed gratification is the theme of this part of the process. We are working like crazy, but it seems there is little to show. But this invisible work is important, even if not particularly rewarding. If we don’t clear the garden or scrub the walls or get the right and discounted radiators now, we’ll pay the price later – in both time and financial terms. But I’m not going to lie, it’s hard to stay motivated when you’re slowly filling your 30^th bag of garden waste with hands punctured with thorn injuries only to look out and see at least another 30 bags of entangled thorns in front of you.

That said, today we actually did something more rewarding – removing bits of poorly constructed stud walls and enclosures. Finally something noticeable and some nice surprises.

Before

After. And it turns out the lovely original doors for this are in the attic.

In the meantime, the undertaker advances....