What A Difference A Year Makes

It’s been 12 months of dust and disturbance as Emma Samms renovated her Cotswold home, but was it worth it? You bet it was!

As I write this, I realise that it’s been almost a year to the day since the builders arrived to sort out my house. I say ‘sort out’ because after 20 years of housing my family and me, it was beginning to misbehave in quite a spectacular number of ways.

The ancient plumbing would grumble and moan and leak at the most inconvenient times, the 1970s wiring, fabulous in its day, had partied too long and too hard and was now dated and exhausted. The house had doggedly refused to accommodate youthful whippersnappers like wifi or satellite television and seemed to be trying to teach me that being cold was good for my constitution.

So the job of dragging my house into the 21st century was tasked to local builder Richard Kelly and his team. Like any good intervention, they arrived en masse and with a no-nonsense approach. Pulling up floorboards, tearing down wallpaper and dragging out huge sections of rusted old pipes, my home became, instantaneously, a building site. I had decided to stay put during the renovation, thinking that there would be enough room for me to find an unaffected corner to live in, but as I moved my little single bed, suitcase of clothes and two dogs from room to room, all three of us soon tired of living such a nomadic existence.

I’ve talked about the unimaginable amounts of dust produced by construction work to anyone who will listen and also in my most recent article on this subject, so I won’t bang on about that now, but I will just mention that I opened a picture frame yesterday and there was plaster dust inside that, which I think says it all.

The builders left last month and supposedly this is now the fun bit: putting the house back together and decorating and furnishing each room with a fresh eye. After nearly a year of upheaval I’ve had to reinvigorate my nest-building instinct and try to enjoy the process.