It's now been 266 days - 38 weeks exactly - since our house was damaged by a flash flood and we had to evacuate. I'd love to say that things are progressing rapidly towards a time when we can return home... but sadly, that's far from the case.
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Shrink-wrapped wooden doors in an indoor residential building site.
There are two specific problems1 that make our chances of being home by Christmas look increasingly slim:
- The new flooring still hasn't arrived. Originally projected to finish being laid last month at the latest, the tiles that will comprise our replacement floor still aren't even on-site. Via a daisy chain of contractors and their suppliers, we've heard every excuse under the sun. There's a delay in manufacturing. Shipping's delayed through the Suez Canal2. They're not unloaded yet. There's been a train derailment.
- There's an unresolved dispute over the kitchen. Our insurance policy says "like-for-like". We feel that the materials they're using to construct the new kitchen, which substitute MDF in place of pine, do not constitute a like-for-like replacement. Our insurance company doesn't entirely agree with us. So everything's ground to a halt while that gets resolved. Unfortunately that's also apparently a blocker to the completion of electrical works, so there are all kinds of knock-on effects3.
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Rear of a yellow-brick suburban house with a conservatory.
Meanwhile, we continue to live in the "Chicory House", our temporary accommodation for most of this year. It's... fine, I guess, but it's not home. We never expected to be here quite this long, and it's got certain suboptimal thermal characteristics4 that we're really beginning to feel as we draw closer to a winter we never expected to spend here. This wasn't our first choice for a temporary home, and we might have spent longer to find something better suited to us... had we known quite how long we'd be here, but that's just the way of our lives right now.
The daily inconveniences of our temporary arrangement - e.g. having to do school runs and ferrying of children to and from friends' houses by car, coping with limited the work-from-home space, collecting mail from two addresses5, etc. - plus wrangling the twists and turns of the insurance claim... have started to become routine. It feels a bit tragic that, nowadays, working around our situation is just "everyday living".
But at least we can look forward to things feeling, perhaps, easier when it's finally all over. We're trying to keep our spirits up by keeping our eyes on the horizon. This week we ordered the appliances that'll someday have a home in our replacement kitchen. We also set aside a bottle of champagne with which to celebrate moving back in. That feels a little premature, like tempting fate, but it's an expression of hope. And hope is important. Hope keeps us fighting for a path back home.
Footnotes
1 Let me be clear: there are more than two problems and disagreements. But only two look critical and blocking. Did I mention that making an insurance claim for a flooded house can sometimes feel like being a full-time project manager?
2 I mean... they might get a bit of a pass for events in the Middle East right now, I suppose. Although given that we originally thought these materials were coming from Germany and only later learned that they were being sourced from Egypt, perhaps our frustration can be understood.
3 Until any sockets and isolator switches are completed, there are parts of the house that can't be replastered. Until the replastering is completed, there are parts of the house that can't be repainted. And so on. If you're imagining some horrendously-complicated Gantt chart... then you're probably being unduly optimistic: I'm convinced that the map of these various blockers and their interactions exists entirely within the foreman's head.
4 By way of example of how the Chicory House's thermal design isn't great: the conservatory and kitchen are a single open-plan unit, which means that the insulation of most of the ground floor is limited to the efficacy of a glass ceiling. Oh, and it's heated by fuel oil, which is expensive and uncapped by the energy regulator? Erk!
5 More annoying than the regular post is ensuring that when you order something for some future date that it will be delivered to where you expect to be, wherever that might be (because who knowsโฝ).
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