Lesley is surrounded by sniffles

Posted: 26th October 2007 11:40

'Family members look out of place if they're not staggering about clutching a sick bucket...'

Half term is upon us and, so it seems, is every cold and stomach bug in the vicinity. In the cottage at the moment, family members look out of place if they're not staggering about, clutching a mug of Lem-Sip or a sick bucket.

It's business as usual down at the build, however, and the big skylight in the hall has now been installed and glazed. The windows in the garden room have also been fitted and the external rendering on the first floor is complete. The sparkies have got to grips with the wiring boxes for the mains consumer units, the ground floor ceilings are going in and some of the scaffolding on the river-facing side of the house has already been taken down. It's a bit like when kids have braces removed from their teeth and you can finally see what's been going on behind them. I don't visit the site as much as Husband does, so I always find it uplifting to walk in and see the progress.

Speaking of progress, Husband has finally found the bath of his dreams. Hallelujah. (Cue slow-motion, soft-focus footage of the two of them dreamily skipping together through a meadow full of daisies). The plumbers were nagging us to specify exactly which showers and baths we would be installing in the bathrooms, so a fraught weekend was spent on the internet and wandering around showrooms, in a desperate attempt to nail them once and for all. As painful as it was at the time, especially for the children, at least we now have a better idea of what the rooms are going to look like and I feel less panicky.

The downside of this flurry of activity on the bathroom front is that we found ourselves buying new baths and basins when we had already put aside loads of bathroom stuff from our previous house that we intended to use again. We were seduced by all the lovely, shiny, sparkly things that we saw in the showrooms. That's the tough part of building a new house – you want every room to be fantastic, but unless you have a bottomless pit of money, or a tree that brings forth crisp new £50 notes every day, you have to be careful not to get carried away.

We've now exceeded the budget set aside for bathroom stuff, so economies will have to be made elsewhere. With this in mind, I can't understand why Husband went out for an emergency assault on Sainbury's while I was at home nursing the sick and came back with 52 bags of crisps. That's two 26-bag packs. Mind you, I bought something silly myself the other day. I saw an irresistible severed leg in the Halloween aisle of Asda and I confess, it had to be mine. Oh, how we laughed as we hid it in each other's beds all week. And, far from being a flash in the highly commercial and lucrative Halloween pan, it now makes a charming and stylish light pull for the kids' bedroom.

Read more entries in this blog