Our en-suite bathroom and dressing room doors are finally installed and painted - a protection against sights and smells you'd rather not see or smell!
 As well as recent guests, workmen building doors, mattress deliveries, selling furniture, tutoring and coaching, I've also managed to get the doorbell and security system working. Don't you dare burgle us!
As of this afternoon, we are the proud owners of our long-term home.   Work has begun on our garden - repaired fence posts, new seating area, railway sleeper borders, planter boxes, power-hosed patio slabs, shingle centre ...it's all happening (slowly!)  When we moved into our little house, we found a garden with weeds grown up to chest height. Having removed all of them, we are now thinking how best to use the space, making it tenant friendly for when we move to somewhere bigger next year.  My brother Dave drove us from Hereford to Chippenham yesterday and we saw out new little house for the first time. It's in Gabriel Mews, a 2-bed with a small (overgrown) garden. Our good friends Krista and Stuart live in Chippenham and have been buying furniture, decorating and repairing our house over recent months to make our move there as smooth and homely as possible. They've done such a great job - we were gobsmacked when we arrived at how "ready" it was for us to move into.  Tomorrow we plan to go hunting for a washing machine, a car, a TV and a hoover!
 We're back from our holiday in Dali.
And yes, we fnjoyed ourselves. Jiajia loves her gadgets and we have recently bought two robots. One cleans windows and the other cleans floors. I'm not convinced either saves a lot of time, but it is fun to see them scuttling about the house!  The view from our bedroom is so much better now after the "new" neighbourhood management company chopped back the branches of a tree immediately outside our window, repaved the sitting area below and planted flowers and bushes in all the garden sections.   JD's daily routine throughout this extended virus outbreak "holiday" involves doing 1½ hours of homework each morning (Maths and English with Daddy) and 1½ hours more each afternoon/evening (Chinese with Mummy). He doesn't like it, but he's getting used to it!
We had workmen in for most of today and, by late this afternoon, we had a new wardrobe, five shelves, a hanging rack, four chairs, a table and three cupboards. We now have so much storage space that half of it is empty!
 One of the final stages of our house move fell into place last week with the delivery of our new three-piece suite. So today, our old sofa goes to the old flat and a final cupboard is moved from there to our new flat. And then we need to pick up a new cupboard bought from a friend of ours. All change!
 For the last 20 months we have been living in a tiny flat while our main house has been gutted, extended, renovated and redecorated. Finally, this weekend, we moved back. Ten full car trips to take over the last of our basics we are finally all in - if not quite unpacked or tidied yet.
We now have an extended office, central heating, new kitchen (with new oven, microwave and dishwasher), two new bathrooms, two walk-in wardrobes, new floors and stairs, a utility room, under-stairs storage, new furniture and new double-glazed windows. It was a mammoth task designed, planned and overseen by my good wife. She has really stamped her unique artistic sense on every room, from the "random" tiles to two antique doors re-purposed as table tops!   Lovely to meet up with Cathy yesterday, a friend for about ten years since I moved to Kunming. She and her boyfriend were up in Kunming for some paperwork business and came to the house here for lunch and a chat. Cathy lives in JingHong, a 45 minute flight away, in the sub-tropical south of Yunnan, where she runs an English language school called "Cool School" (my original suggestion for a name). JD enjoyed playing with her, despite him still suffering with a week-long cough and sore throat.
 This week, Jiajia has been concentrating on decorating the new flat, bought on behalf of her uncle. I call him "Drunkle", as he's rarely sober. He's not technically Jiajia's real uncle - just a family friend whom Ava's grandmother made her promise to look after on her death bed. Not that "grandmother" was technically Ava's grandmother either, but that's another story!
 New properties in China are sold as concrete shells, with no floor, no plastered walls and only the most basic of amenities. So Jiajia has been scouring markets and the internet to buy wooden floorboards, tiles, lights, sink, taps, etc. She timed it so that she could buy a lot of things on 11th Nov, which is "Singles Day" in China (11/11, geddit?). As well as remembering those who can't yet take part in "Valentine's Day", it is also famous for big discounts in shops and on internet websites. So Ava was up until 3am getting bargains for the flat from, as the floorboard shop puts it, "...the wood of departure Philosophical world". Quite.
 Jiajia, JD and I will be moving into a small flat early next year while our main house is remodelled and redecorated. After 4-6 months we should be able to return to a beautiful "new" abode - at least, that's the plan. The new flat is on the 11th floor and overlooks a Kindergarten now sporting a natty new name!
 We were treated to a visit from Daizzy and her family this week. She was in Kunming for a couple of days from Qiaojia (5 hours away by car - used to be 13!) where she lives and works as an English teacher. I did a week of training there some 8 years ago and we have kept in touch ever since. The weather was hot and warm and her daughter, "Amber", enjoyed playing on the slides with JD in our local children's park. Unfortunately, the following day was suddenly quite cold and wet and, perhaps because of that, I found myself feeling quite dizzy throughout the day (something I suffered from a lot a few years ago, but have been free of since). Hopefully it's just a blip on the health front.
 Pleased with the shelving we'd had installed above my office desk some months ago, we decided to add more above Ava's table. The workmen cancelled their visit a few days ago, but turned up just an hour late this morning and fixed the shelves within 20 minutes. The photo [right] is a mixed "before" and "after" shot. We now have so much storage space we don't know what to fill it with!
 The list of "things to do before the baby arrives" is gradually getting ticked off. The kitchen is replaced. The old office is now a baby/nanny bedroom. The doors to the new office and bathroom are due to arrive and be fitted today. The wall shelves and self-standing bookshelves arrived yesterday and are already full of stuff. The live-in nanny was due to arrive last Sunday but, whilst driving here, she heard her 21 year-old son had been in a car accident and broken his leg. So we're hoping for a back-up nanny to arrive today. Clothes and nappies are bought. Another scan is due tomorrow. I've planned lessons for two weeks cover at school. And the interminable paperwork required to register a newborn in China is up to date. What have we forgotton...? [P.S. The photo above makes it look like one very crowded corner of a
room! It's actually 2 separate places in the flat, photo-shopped together!]  It's that time of year again when our school welcomes a group of foreign teenagers for 8 days training, preparing them to be English teachers in Chinese school for 5 months. I do the majority of the training and co-ordinate input from six other teachers and five administration staff. This time we have 29 Lattitude volunteers from 5 different countries - our biggest intake yet. 25 of them arrived safely this afternoon, whilst 3 arrived late due to flight problems. One won't be arriving until later in the week due to passport problems!  Meanwhile, back at home, Ava is coordinating something altogether different. Workers have been in to build a wall (turning our balcony area into a room) and knock a door in our en suite bathroom to allow the nanny and baby to have access without having to walk through our bedroom. Once again, the house is full of tools and covered in a layer of dust. After some painting, we are doing no more major work until the baby is here and settled.
 I've spent the last few days turning our office room into a baby room and turning the balcony area into a functioning "office". It hasn't been easy doing all the lifting and lugging by myself, but as the other adults in the house are either too old or too pregnant it's been down to me. Not helped by my dreadful DIY skills, of course. However slowly I take the job and however hard I try, it nearly always ends in disaster: Drill a hole in the wall? The drill bit broke. Shorten a wooden table top? The saw got stuck and the table snapped. Screw together a bed? Not enough bolts and the wrong size spanner for the nuts. Assembly a baby bouncer? The plastic leg broke. Drag a table across the room? The glass top suddenly slid off and shattered, cutting open my foot. You get the idea. Give me a computer or a blackboard any day!   The kitchen is finally finished. It was, to a large extent, a cock-up from start to finish. Cupboard doors put in the wrong place, extractor fan initially at a jaunty angle, stone surfaces not joining properly, waterproofing layer not put in, drawers too high or too low, a hole to allow electrical acess forgotton and always a complete mess when the workers left for the day such as the man drilling the stone top [see photo, left] who managed to deposit a thick layer of dust throughout the house, despite the kitchen doors being closed and windows open.  Despite our patient explanations and encouragement to "leave it for now", Ma-in-law never quite grasped the sense in waiting until all the work was complete before trying to clean everywhere. Every day she was waking up early to deep-clean the kitchen, barely an hour before the next set of workers arrived to create more chaos. Still, it's given her something to moan about... "I'm so old and yet I'm the only one who cleans the house!" ...THEN JUST STOP, WOMAN!!  My pet peeve was that all the wood patterns on the cupboard doors matched up with all the others around them except for one [..wonder if you can spot it, above?]. The boss of the installation company explained that wood cut from different parts of a tree leads to different patterns. All very interesting except that, as I pointed out, these are plastic formica doors. The nearest they've been to a tree is the MDF plywood underneath. We lost that battle, but they are going to replace another drawer which doesn't close smoothly. Believe it or not, we didn't skimp on the materials or the installation company - this is apparently good quality work for China!
 Five workers, five hours, £500 and we now live in a prison!
After a number of recent burglaries in our neighborhood - one ending in a murder - we decided to bite the bullet and install security bars on all our windows. We should now be safe from thieves, but in all sorts of trouble if there is a fire near the front door! We also arranged for the workmen to add some extra bars to the rail of our stairs (to stop any toddlers slipping through) and repair our kitchen door which has become impossible to close or lock. All in all, a good half-days work. Something which definitely needed doing but which we had put off for some time.  Jiajia and I hosted a nice evening yesterday with a bunch of foreigners from my school. We offered DIY pizzas (dough bases, with a wide choice of ingredients, as half the visitors were vegetarians or similar) followed by fruit salad and cream. Plenty of snacks, drinks and a silly game of "guessing lists" made for a fun time.
|
 AuthorPaul Hider started this blog to share his rather odd life living in China for over 20 years. Since returning to the UK in 2024, the blog now records his more "normal" lifestyle! Past blog entries
May 2025
Tags
All
|
