Renos

They say one tip for a happier life is to clear out the clutter. We have been working hard at that recently.

Looking at our small house, bursting with toys, clothes, children’s artwork, craft materials, plastic bicycles, bound and loose recipes, vases, legos, clothes racks, birthday cards, books, food scraps and odds and ends of all descriptions, I wrote a list earlier this year. It was entitled ‘what really annoys me in this house.’

I listed all the things that I found irritating, from the fact that the girls’ play table was always piled high with craft/textas/papers, meaning that the only place for them to create the artwork was the dining room table, which would then be similarly cluttered – to the fact that the piano was always piled with large artworks or random objects – to me not having enough room for all my clothes to be hung in my wardrobe. Categorising all these bugbears, I came to the conclusion that while some of our stuff could be thrown out or given away, most of it could not. A large component of all this clutter could be dealt with if we had a long desk, cupboards and shelving built along the far edge of our dining room.

We sketched out our needs, Steve’s architect brother-in-law Pierre kindly designed it properly, including suggesting an environmentally friendly desk surface called furniture linoleum that I had never heard of, and we asked our reliable local tradie to install it. After a very long process of a good six months of mixups with the wrong linoleum colour sent and delays from either us or our tradie being on holidays, it was installed a few weeks ago.

Into the drawers went the lego, puzzles, textas, clean paper, yet-to-be-organised completed artwork, and craft, with a drawer each for the girls’ treasures (a fabulous nine drawers of order in all). The three-metre-long desktop is now home to a peppa pig house and castle, the girls’ large remote-control cars and various other things, which although fairly numerous, don’t look cluttered. A bookshelf contains all of our recipe books and another shelf contains display books of the girls’ artworks over the past few years, colour-coded green for Lara and red for Rhea. Above this, the locked cupboards contain nail polish and paint on one side and biscuits, chocolates and food colouring on the other, topped by a shelf of vases and framed photos. Ah, the expansive, organised, uncluttered whiteness of it all!

At the same time, we have been increasingly aware that now in our tenth year of living in our house, the ceiling is cracked and the plaster is buckled in places, the white walls are yellowing and the cornices are peeling away in quite a few areas. And that’s not considering the painted exterior, which is now faded blue. If houses need to be painted every seven years, it’s probably time ours was done.

What’s more, I may not have mentioned that our ducted gas heating broke down in early winter, and we decided to research what option is best instead of simply having it repaired. We have used our combustion fireplace (three-and-a-half tonnes of wood) and a little bar heater in the mornings to get us through the winter while Steve diligently researched our options. (We have learnt that this heating patch wasn’t a particularly cheap, easy or effective option for the longer term).

Finally, last Wednesday, the man from the ducted electricity company was booked in to install our new heating.

Steve was there to meet him. First, he asked Steve to clear away the bushes where the heating unit would be installed outside the house, because ‘they weren’t gardeners.’ Steve got to work chopping branches away. The man climbed up into our roof. He came down again within a couple of minutes. ‘I can’t go up there. It looks like you have loose asbestos in your roof.’

Steve and I conferred over the phone, both in shock. I was inclined to move out straight away, but Steve had arranged for the necessary specialist to do an assessment within a week and he thought we should wait to see what that concluded. We were both keen to find the housing report from when we bought the house ten years ago. When we consulted it that night, after a worrying day, it said that the house was likely to contain asbestos in the laundry ceiling and below the floor and that further assessment was suggested, however the accompanying information brochure indicated that three-quarters of houses in this town of that era contain asbestos, and it may not be a problem if there has not been any disturbance through drilling, renovating etc. I assume that this reassurance was the reason why we hadn’t followed it up at the time.

I have tried not to panic and have plans for possible temporary housing if we do have to move out. We can use the money we have borrowed for the painting (maybe we won’t need that after all!) and heating – the bank lent us more than we needed for that – to pay for its removal. And if the girls and we, and Heidi, our uninsured nanny have been exposed to dangerous levels of it, there is nothing we can do except monitor our health and be more wary in future.

Fingers crossed for the results after next Wednesday.