Question: What is worse than a weekend filled with roofing sub-contractors?
Answer: A garden filled with piles of wrongly-sized, unusable roof timbers. And a house missing several chunks of roof. In heavy rain.

The long weekend was indeed long. And not in a good way.

The roofing business is a bit complicated, but apparently, 'it never goes wrong'. The builder sends to the plans to the timber yard. The timber yard representatives comes and measures. The timber yard produces, with the aid of a CAD tool, an impressively complex roof plan. The builder uses this to build gables of the correct height. The timber yard delivers the roof trusses. The roofing sub-contractor comes and builds the roof, using the delivered trusses and the timber yard's roof plan.

Only, in our case, there were a couple more steps, such as: The timber yard comes and completely stuffs up the measuring. The builders query the height of the required gable, the timber yard reassures them. The delivered trusses match the CAD plan perfectly, but sadly, do not extend to actually cover the building. The roofing sub-contractor spends an annoying four hours on Saturday trying to make inadequate trusses work, and finally gives up in disgust.

And last night Peter and I were up into the small hours boxing up the contents of the kitchen, lounge and dining room. This was in preparation for today, as today the builders got started in the living areas - taking down various internal walls. Fortunately, by yesterday evening we had both retrieved our sense of humour about the whole situation and it was quite a giggly evening.

We are currently living in three bedrooms and one tiny bathroom. The toilet, however, has a new, attached, toilet seat. In a startling shade of white atop the avacodo, or is it slime green, toilet. This new toilet seat, it should be mentioned, was installed approximately one hour before Daniel's birthday party last week, as we thought it would be a bit of a dampener on the celebrations if any of the guests were incapacitated by a detaching toilet seat.

This whole process of altering the house is rather like moving. Only, you move out a few rooms at a time - a few rooms every few weeks. Oh, and there's no one to help you box everything up. And en route to the new house (lets not forget the fact that it takes about three months to get there) you live in appallingly squat-like, dirty, noisy, rainy, muddy accomodation, filled with approximately 14 large, noisy, cigarette-smoking men, their boots and their clothing.