Economic gloom and doom. Rising oil prices. Rising interest rates. Getting on for a million people failing to make their mortgage payments as the newer, harder times squeeze. And two houses in our street failing, for a year, to sell at prices that seem only a tiny bit optimistic. The neighbours are enjoying endless coffee klatsches to discuss why and what’s wrong with the nation’s finances/the area/the council/rubbish collection, but although every aspect of the subject is chewed over with gusto no one can work out why the punters aren’t biting.
Not the right time to be spending a fortune building a new floor at the top of our house, then. Or so any right-minded person might think.
Yet we need the space since Grandad moved in, and we keep telling ourselves that we’re doing the right thing for the children by improving the house, and we’ve borrowed the money already, so we’re pressing on, with a combination of terror and that foolhardy spirit of derring-do that afflicts so many London households. In a week or so, men speaking a Slavic tongue will deliver the scaffolding. Tools will be stacked neatly on top of the wisteria, which only just survived our previous onslaught of builders last summer. Fag ends and Coke cans will appear underfoot. Lamps quietly broken will be quietly disposed of. And the whole creeping horror of living in a building site will begin again.
We know the drill. Two years ago we bought a tiny extra patch of garden. Last year we expanded the kitchen into it. This year we’ve had decorators. So we are familiar with all the reasons why work stops suddenly and the workers disappear during Week Five of any project, and a good many of the reasons why everything will end up costing double what we first budgeted for. We’re also old friends with Jovan, who spoke the best pigeon English of the last team, and who went off to marry someone with British residence papers so he could stay in the country and now has a three-month-old baby son.
Times have changed since the kitchen job, and not just for Jovan. His boss, Slava, has learnt enough about London to work out that he used to charge too little. Unlike most London builders, he actually does the job he charges for and it stays done. So his prices have rocketed to wicked London levels and he is looking sleek and well-fed. Which is good, in one way, but of course bad for our overstretched budget.
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If only we had become as prosperous from the London building boom as Slava has, we might feel happier. Instead, we’re using plastic bags to cover everything in the present top-floor, and resigning ourselves to doing a lot of decorating ourselves once the money runs out. My inner demons, which must all be architects, are urging me not to stop now. But every bit of tape, and every plastic bag, fill me with greater dread.
The only thing that, to date, has reassured me is the belief that once it is done we’ll be finished with home improvements forever. The neighbours already think we’re barking because we’ve done so much patching and fixing to this house. So this has been my renunciation mantra for months, the thing I tell my husband every time he suggests we wait, or drop the plans altogether, the thing I say to the children when they complain about their toys being bagged up and about spending the next three months eating pizza off beds and washing up in the loo, the thing I almost believe: once we’ve built the room in the roof, there will be nowhere left to expand, nowhere left to expand, nowhere left to expand …
How ignorant I’ve been. Yesterday I picked up a magazine at the hairdressers and happened on a terrifying lifestyle feature about home-improvement addicts in West London, where people are richer and every fashion goes that dangerous bit further.
And I discovered that you can, after all, expand your house even once you’ve built on every available roof and bit of garden. You tunnel underneath. Into a dark but cavernous space, you slot your wine cellar, indoor swimming pool, gym and the other luxuries of the metropolitan life.
Breaking out into a cold sweat, I put the page aside. That’s pure Tory Notting Hill grandstanding, I told myself. Surely even David Cameron’s house isn’t having a makeover on quite that scale. Thank God I live in North London, where I don’t need to think about such things. Thank God there’s no way I could ever dream of affording them. If this project doesn’t finish us all off, I promise I’ll never do any more to the house, ever.
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I meant it, honestly. Who needs dank underground space at a squillion pounds a square metre? Yet, in the small hours, strange, covetous thoughts came unbidden into my mind. Grandad doesn’t swim any more now he’s living with us; I imagined life-giving dawn workouts in a basement pool before a skip up the spiral staircase for a muesli breakfast in the kitchen. How long before I clicked on that company’s link and started doing back-of-an-envelope sums to see how much it would, actually, cost, and how much further I could, actually, stretch the mortgage?
Only at dawn did a wave of common sense break over me like cold dirty water. And suddenly I knew: none of this is necessary. Not the basement, and probably not even the room in the roof. The children won’t be grateful. They probably won’t be rich either from all these real or imagined home improvements, because going further and further into debt is an absurd expense that hangs over you for decades. They’ll just be depressed if we bicker over the costs, as we did last time and the time before. And they’ll miss the exotic lion-hunting holidays they like to fantasise about while I’m greedily imagining Jacuzzis in the broom cupboard. Building bits on to your home isn’t a way to make life better. It’s an addiction, like alcohol or drugs or shopping. I’ve got an illness.
So it’s settled. There’s nothing I can do this time; the scaffolding’s already on the way. But next time I start dreaming of home improvements, I’m not going to call Slava the builder. I’ll be on the phone to a shrink.
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