Saturday 3 March 2012

Builders in the House

Once again I find myself having to apologise for the length of time it has taken me to write something since my last entry. Sorry! My wife, who somehow finds time to write something most days, puts me to shame.

For those of you who don't know, Kayo and I work mainly in a room on the ground floor of our three-storey home. It isn't that big, but we have managed for the eleven or so years that we have been self-employed. Of late, though, there has been an increasing need to have another classroom and also a bigger room to accommodate larger classes.

I wish I had a wider angle lens, but here are some photographs of our ground floor. This one was taken from the front door. The door on the left in the immediate foreground is a floor to ceiling shoe cupboard, and the white wall on the right is part of the cloakroom/boxroom. You can see into the classroom, and a little way up the hall that goes to the stairs.



Inside the classroom, which, for sure, looks a bit cluttered! Of course, I have to have a map of the UK and a picture of Glencoe; and all the postcards are from friends, family, and students from wherever they have been on holiday.



The reverse angle showing about half of our textbooks, and some cupboards that conceal all manner of things including a television which we sometimes use in class. Yes, yes... that is a squash poster on the cupboard door!




This is looking across the hall into the cloakroom, or perhaps I should say storeroom. You can see a stack of winter tyres, and I keep all my squash kit in here, too.





So... that was how it all looked until Wednesday of this week. We had decided it was about time to take some drastic action, and had spoken with a local company to see if it was possible to "rearrange" things to give us both a second room and a bigger room. "Oh, yes" they said, and on Thursday they arrived...


This was taken just a few hours after they arrived, and from pretty much the same place as the first photograph above. Most of the doors have been taken away, the cloakroom gone(!), and the hall temporarily blocked off to stop too much dust getting into the rest of the house.





A somewhat bemused Tadashi arriving home from school. But that was Thursday...

This was yesterday, and oh, my goodness, what have they done?! What have they done with the floor? It's starting to look like an archeological dig. The whole floor was supported on the six rocks you can see, which the builder says is perfectly OK, but perhaps a little unusual in a concrete house like ours. He told us that is how traditional Japanese houses were built.

That is where we are at the moment. It is all very exciting, and we are really looking forward to seeing how things develop. The work is scheduled to take about three weeks, and I hope to be able to keep you updated on an almost daily basis. Come back and see how we are doing!

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