Being Mostly About Doors

The house is breeding, rooms have appeared and while the two parts might have seemed small, the sum of them together far exceeds our expectations. Money – lots of it, naturally – well spent.
We are now eyeing, with envy, T10’s “suite,” which joins to his brother by means of a shared bathroom (and yes, we are treating the ingrates to some juicy glass tiles for which I have driven to furthest westest Wales: not my greenest outing, my carbon footprint trembles).
Our quarters seem sad and shabby by comparison and piled high, still, with oddments of possessions we have grown to loathe.

For the woods we ain’t out of yet.

The banging continues. The obstacle course to get out of the gate gets more interesting and limb-threatening each day.
The kitchen has been knocked into the new dining room, which is the old outside, and into the old dining room which we used to call the caravan (evening sun meaning you have to wear sunglasses to eat, people drifting past on the Right Of Way at the back of the narrow garden, etc).
It’s bloody enormous.
E, or Bill, as perhaps it is easier to call him, had an awkward moment when I was in Wales. He was making tea, a strawberry punnet already full of sodden bags, it being ten in the morning.
Jase leant on his axe. “Big room, this,” he said, “as big as my whole house.”
Bill stiffened at his kettle. Actually that sounds obscene, he just went still and quiet and a little red in the face.
But help in the form of a “No,” was at hand.
“No,” said Gaz.
A pause.
“Your house is only as big as this bit here.”
Bill stirred his spoon briskly, eyes averted like Princess Di, praying for Scotty to beam him up.

As Bill has said in his blog, he is busy with doors.
Doors, things you open and shut in normal life, which the children let slam in your face when you’re struggling in with all the shopping. But also things which have another use which the kind passing of time causes you to forget: choosing them; getting them; getting handles; buying handles from the fourth place you trail round, all close to tears; realising once home that these cheap handles are cheap since there are no “keeps”; going out again rather brisk and bad-tempered to buy keeps - whatever they are; varnishing them; them getting stuck when the floor shifts and cracks appear upstairs.
Hours of recreational purpose meted out by a door.
Starting with getting them.
Last week, Gaz barged into the kitchen waving a screwdriver.
“These doors, Carmeel. Chippy’s here to hang ‘em.”
I went wide-eyed.
Had I been warned that I should have 21 doors hanging around to be placed on hinges within 20 minutes?
I don’t think I had.
I whittered about having found some "cheap" ones but that I had to get them delivered yet.
"Good," says Gaz, "damnfool go spending fifty pound on a door." He and his son chortled at the idiocy of the middle classes.
I gulped. My "cheap" ones were over a hundred. Smoothing of the way required to produce a middle path in that antsy ground where sensible son of toil meets mimsy Mrs quasi-Posh, but prior to that was another quandary.
"Oi, Carmeel," he said, "you having artex in these here ceilings or what?"
I blanched.
"No, I think not," I said, appearing to give the idea some consideration.
His eyes rolled evesoslightly heavenwards.

His lovely son meanwhile had gone off in the truck to get themselves a hot dog from the stand on the by-pass.
“Give us-selves a treat, Carmella, well tidy that van, nice, yeah” I can report, with yet another tiresome and patronising stab at a full-on Gloucester accent. I can do nothing to convey its up-beat cheeriness which is a shame because he is a sweetie. Or well tidy.

Outside the house is Gaz’s wife’s motor. I thought he was calling it a hearse. Well it is black, and an unlikely Chrysler.
Unlikely in a horribly judgemental sort of way: this goes without saying.
Given the tum, the tats, his dislike of any fancy frippery which might have led one to believe that a truck was the natural recreational vehicle of choice, with or without high heels, in or out of normal building hours. I'd sort of read his tastes into hers. But then I've never claimed to have any imagination.
I frowned, “I sort of see what you mean,” I mused, looking it up and down, edging Lolly off from nipping my ankles.
“You what?” he said.
“Calling it a hearse,” I said, “kind of long, I suppose, dark.”
Needless to say it was “the hers” he meant. The motor what belongs to Mrs Gaz, the car being hers.
“Ah,” I said. “OK.”
Gaz gave me the look he reserves for the skip monkey, (another cheerful little soul, with his asthma inhaler in one hand and a full wheelbarrow in the other tottering along a rotten plank).
I hastened to the kettle.