a cardboard box under the motorway

Kitchen renovation plans continue apace. We have had more people in this house over the last two weeks than in the entire year previous. It has been surprisingly stressful. I'm not good at having people in my space any more.

The guy we are probably going to hire isn't the cheapest, but I like how up-front he is about timelines and cost and he was very willing to explain everything in detail. The whole tear-down and rebuild is going to take longer and be more expensive than normal just because you can't get machinery into our backyard so it all has to be done by hard manual labour and hard manual labour charges by the hour.

On the plus side, we won't have to move out while the work is going on, so that will save us a bit of dosh.

I am occasionally tempted by listings of houses in other cities where properties aren't going for a billion dollars. But I'd probably end up starting the renovation process over again from scratch, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that either