Recently we had the Construction Queen in. There were two reasons for this; 1) we liked the name of her business and 2) we wanted to establish exactly what it was that we couldn’t afford to do to the house.
Like all good project managers she started off by asking what our budget was in repsonse to which we looked confused and repeated ‘Budget?’ several times. Just to make it clear exactly what sort of crazy dreamers she was dealing with we then gave her a wish-list a mile long to which she added a couple of the more practical (and expensive)issues like a new sewerage outlet since it appears that the current arrangement is now deemed not-good-enough by the authorities.* We also gave her a pile of pages torn from designer magazines, just to cement the madness, before sending her off to work a miracle.
Apparently she will have done this by tomorrow and we will then see an indicative floor sketch with a rough estimate of costs. At which point we will lie down and cry.
*We would just like to take this opportunity to say that we have been sharing sewerage with the Mokbels now for eighteen months and have always found it a pleasure.
postcards from the north 