The advent of summer means different things to different people. Trips to the seaside. Family holidays. A gentle spot of gardening and then relaxing with a crossword over a cup of tea in the garden.
When he was gainfully employed, the husband used to work most of the summer, leaving me to arrange activities for boisterous children and, later, bored teens.
Now that the offspring have children of their own and the husband has retired, one might expect us to take the opportunity to make the most of warmer weather together. But no. Nowadays the end of the football season heralds only one thing: a project.
One summer he decided to repaint the entire hallway, up and down stairs, including the bannisters. The process started with removing wallpaper and sanding down paintwork – it went on for days and by the end, despite my keeping as many doors closed as possible, every room in the house was covered in a fine layer of dust.
The next stage – the application of the paint itself – was equally protracted. The final straw was when he blue he had chosen for the bannisters turned out to be less of an Oxford blue than he (or I) had anticipated but I pretended not to notice. By that time I just wanted my house and my sanity back.
This year the project is easier to live with. It involves the garden.
We have a smallish London garden, with steps leading down from a patio to a rectangle of scruffy lawn and another bit of hard standing at the bottom.
Almost 20 years ago we foolishly planted Leylandii here to screen the block of flats behind us. We also had a shed there and a section of decking to each side. Because the garden is on a slight slope, the decking on the right was raised and nicknamed the bandstand.
We originally put a table and chairs on it because it caught the evening sun but as no-one could ever be bothered to take their G and T down there, preferring to sit on the patio by the French windows, we took the chairs away.
Years passed, the Leylandii grew … and grew … until I insisted they had to come down as they were taking up too much space and cutting off too much light.
Then the shed started to lean ominously to one side and the decking on the left side started to rot. It got so bad that I banned the grandchildren from the bottom of the garden and refused to enter the shed myself in case the whole thing came down on top of me.
Finally, this year, the husband agreed something had to be done. I was all for getting in a garden firm to do the work. The fence round the garden also needed replacing and the husband had already promised not to attempt this singlehandedly. I argued that the men who were going to do the fencing could also put up a shed and some new decking. In fact, I said, wistfully, it would be nice if we dished the decking and had some nice paving slabs instead.
My words fell on deaf ears. And so it came to pass that my husband and his eldest son made many trips to the dump. The fencers came and put up the fence. Then – despite the instructions being written in gobbledygook instead of English, the husband and his son erected something the husband insists isn’t a shed but a summerhouse.
He then proceeded to paint it in two different shade of green to match the paint he had used on the new fence.
All this took some time and, despite the trips to the dump, the garden still seemed to be full of old fence panels, bits of old decking and even bits of the old shed.
It slowly dawned on me that a key part of the project was to re-use (re-cycle he says, proudly) this wood for new decking. There has been much sawing and hammering. At one point (in order to remove the Leylandii roots) there was even the purchase of a chain saw. So far there have been no trips to A and E. But we are now well into the third month and there seems to be no end in sight.
The grandchildren are still banned from the bottom of the garden and have taken to calling the summerhouse a summershed – which seems pretty apt to me.
I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that it all gets finished – even if summer’s over by then.
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