My wife doesn't understand me

Over the last few months I have been building an extension and carrying out some alterations to my house. This includes removing a central chimney stack with five flues and building a new stack with a single flue in a different position so I could make two rooms into one. I have also demolished a nasty little flat-roofed modern built bay window and replaced it with a larger pitched roof bay that matches the other bay at the front of the house. As with all projects that are carried out in one's spare time it has dragged on a bit. During this period we have been holed up in the kitchen. All things considered the family has coped well with this but it is now November, it is getting colder and we still don't have any heating. It doesn't help that there are still a number of holes waiting for timber sash windows.

During the last week or so I have been crawling about under the suspended floor adding power circuits, Cat 5 cabling and new pipe runs for the radiators. I have also taken the opportunity to add some underfloor insulation to parts of the ground floor I couldn't previously reach. The other job I have been doing under there is to drag out sacks of brick rubble. This rubble was not of my making. It was put there some years ago by some lazy builders who built that bay. Rather than cart the rubble away from the knockout they decided to chuck it under the timber floor in a pile. Who would ever know?

Well I would. Since I first discovered it some years ago I have often thought about clearing it away but until now the route out through the house would have been arduous and created a lot of mess. Now with the floor open it seemed the ideal opportunity to bag it up and put it in the skip. Ideal for me that is but when my wife saw me dragging it out she wondered what on earth I was doing.

Her reasoning was that it has been there for roughly forty years (dated by the discarded Woodbine packets) and has never done any harm so why, when all the other work still has to be done, am I wasting time dragging it out?

I explained to her that every time I have been under that floor to run pipes or cables I have crawled across that pile of rubble and cursed.
"Yes but you have now done all that wiring and plumbing work so why clear it when it will not benefit you?"


I explained that I would never chuck rubble under a floor, no matter what it took to cart it away, and I wouldn't expect others to do it. I don't want rubble under my floor because the underside of the floor is not a rubbish tip. It is a ventilated crawl space and the constant stream of air will inevitably blow the dust around. If I to go and work in someone's house and I have to crawl under their floor through rubble or any debris it puts me in a bad mood. I don't even like lifting floor boards and seeing stripped off bits of cable and old dog ends. Instead of enjoying my work I want to punch the lazy bastards who put it there. I get the same feeling that I do when I see people chucking litter out of their car window. How dare they?

I could see I was still not persuading her.

"Yes that is all very well but you haven't got time to indulge these fantasies now, it is fast approaching Christmas"

Ah that old one. I haven't got time. Up until that point I could not really nail the central plank of my argument but now I had it. Time, or to be precise, the time I haven't got. The time it takes to do a job properly versus the bish, bash, bosh.
Why haven't I got the time? Why is it that with all our labour-saving devices I still seem to have no time? Why is it that the people who built this house over a hundred years ago with no power tools and no motorised transport had the time to thoroughly clear the underside of the floors and remove every single trace of debris? Not only were their lives, on average, considerably shorter than ours but it is likely that many of those young men went from building these houses on to the battle fields of Flanders. OK they didn't know it at the time but building these houses may have been the last creative work they ever did in their all too short lives. Even if they lived to a ripe old age they are gone now and the only reason I know of their existence at all is because of what they left behind. It is that quality of their workmanship that draws me and many other to live in houses that are over a hundred years old. When I look at the hand built staircases, the plaster cornices run in situ and the brick arches above the windows I am deeply impressed by what they achieved. I cannot see a single gap in the joints of that staircase and there isn't a creak to be heard on any tread.
Why did they have the time to complete a job to a standard that we can not now hope to emulate? Why are we in such a blinding rush to create homes that fall apart in less than a lifetime? The results neither please the people working on them nor the people who live in them. Is this what we want to say to future generations about our values?

I know lots of builders who readily admit that the work they are doing on large housing sites is shameful. They would rather not put their names to it. They are driven to ever tighter deadlines for less money. At least those builders know the difference between a good job and a bad one, there are others who never will know. The so-called builders who put the bay window in my house, for example, didn't have a clue. Every detail of it was shoddy. Large cracks appeared on either side of the windows where they had failed to tie them in properly to the brickwork and they used a really strong mortar to build into a sand and lime construction. They didn't bother digging a decent foundation so the floor dropped by 30mm over 2 metres. Even after cutting all those corners they still didn't have the time or inclination to dispose of the rubble. It's all gone now and I still think we will be in that new room for Christmas. Maybe not this one.....

A couple of years ago a near neighbour of mine spent £30,000 on a loft conversion. He also had his garden landscaped with an extensive bit of decking and shortly after that he put the house on the market just as prices plummeted. To my surprise, and his I think, he got the full asking price. He also managed to buy a much larger house for not a lot more money. All this while others looked nervously waiting for the market to bottom out.
The new people moved in and had a new kitchen fitted and a few weeks after that the deck was on the skip and they were having Indian Sandstone laid. They are still having work done and a good many local tradesmen are grateful for it.
There is of course no guarantee that the current owners will see a return on their outlay but hopefully they will enjoy living in the house. In the end that it what home improvements should be about. If you enjoy living in a house then there is a good chance that somebody else will also enjoy living in it and to my mind if you focus upon that the investment is secondary. It might seem like an obvious statement but 'houses are for living in' and when we lost sight of that simple truth and started treating them as banks we became the architects of our own downfall.