Advisors

On the one hand I am reasonably competent. I am taking on a series of jobs and activities around the house and garden which are both novel to me and reasonably challenging and require some tools and effort and thinking. On the other, I don’t feel very organised at all. When my friend D visits, as he did today, he is often has advice for me, and I get the sense when he visits, he thinks to himself, “oh, this poor guy doesn’t really know what he’s doing, isn’t doing things in the right order, isn’t focusing on the right things”… that puts me in an interesting place because either he is wrong. I am wrong or we are both wrong.

Let’s say he’s wrong and I am right, In which case actually I’m proceeding in just the way I should and everything is fine. There’s nothing for me to think about. This is the least interesting scenario.

So let’s move quickly on to thinking I’m wrong and he is right. In this case it’s about how quickly I can overcome my resistance and adopt the strategies and approaches he’s suggesting. Certainly some of the things he and his wife share with me are based on their experience. For example, they did say if I can then I should make the space to have the tumble dryer and washing machine side-by-side rather than stacked one on top of the other so there is a workspace above them. Washing and drying means moving baskets of laundry, it means folding clothes, it means working with chemicals, and it’s just easier if you have a surface to do that from.

I think it’s an interesting thought. And so last night I thought about the utility room and how to arrange the laundry machines with a drawer at the bottom. Put the units on top of the drawer, which would need to be very solid because washing machines like to dance around. And then put cupboards and a work surface above them.

Last night I had a go at laying this out. I just drew some shapes in GIMP and then tried to lay them out. There are some constrictions and constraints because for example, one of the walls is where all the water is and the outlet for the toilet, the soil stack, is already in one corner and I would rather not move it.

The third scenario is everybody is wrong, and in many ways this is probably closest to the truth. There will be things that D and S don’t know about renovation. There’ll be things that I don’t know about renovation and that we’re both getting wrong at the same time. Things which ought to be done differently, in a different order, in a different way.

Perhaps even they misapprehended my intentions, my priorities and so on. Certainly I think I have a lot of flexibility most people don’t have. So for example, because it’s just me in the house and I work largely remotely, I don’t have the same pressure in terms of cleanliness or sequencing. That said, I am really excited to get one of the upstairs bedrooms organised because now that I have Internet that I can wire into the house, I can work from any room and currently I’m in the kitchen and dining room. Once a bedroom is done and has a heater in it and is, uh, insulated from above, then I will be able to have a warm, comfortable space to work from. And, uh, because it’s just the one room, it won’t take a huge amount of money to decorate it and make it nice and put a decent bed in it. So that’s, that’s something to look forward to.

I do think it’s worth admitting that I feel slightly troubled when people visit and they have very strong opinions about why should and should not be doing. And certainly there is a message here about the critical path. J has talked to me about the critical path before and just making sure that what I’m doing is in fact drawing me closer to the objective. Which at this point is getting the heating system installed and commissioned. Back to it!