Carol’s Column

So who needs a dreamhouse?

A SPIRIT of adventure is a wonderous thing my family told me as I lay in a leaking tent with water dripping on to my new silk sheets.

I lit the gas heater to keep my toes warm.

I have always lived by the principle that hot blood rises causing the rest of the body to warm up fast — including the outer extremities if you wriggle them sufficiently.

Outside the tent, I could hear the happy call of the crested barbet as he pecked a hole in my dressing table.

There's nothing quite like camping, especially when it's in your own bedroom.

You might be wondering what I was doing lying in Horace, our ex-army tent, in Parkwood on a wet Monday morning.

Simple. Like many other young married couples, we'd bought our house many years ago when our budget and family was non-existent.

As is often usual — the family growth rate was phenomenal, while the budget decreased in size.

Things came to a head when we moved the fourth child's bed into the lounge.

The older three sons objected on two grounds.

"It's bad enough sleeping in the lounge and having to keep totally quiet when you have guests for dinner," they complained. "But having to share a room with a girl is the end, that's out."

So we decided to buy another house. A larger, roomier house.

A place where we could spread ourselves.

A place where the children could do their thing in peace and quiet.

I trotted around with obliging estate agents and after two days discovered the only accommodation we could afford to acquire were renovators' dreams that could only be described as nightmares.

In comparison, our own house was a modern masterpiece.

"Right, we'll build," said my intrepid husband, undaunted by such minor technical problems as rising costs and brick shortages.

After much soul searching, he found a builder.

"Is he experienced?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied. "But, more important than that, I like his face."

Our builder, a venerable gentleman indeed, made an appointment to discuss matters with us prior to embarking on the alterations and additions.

"It's not a big job," he said. "It'll take a month or two and then you'll have the house of your dreams."

That was six months ago.

And this week, I came home from the supermarket to discover half of the main bedroom sitting in the yard, which is why we had to pitch Horace.

At the beginning it wasn't too bad.

First to go was the diningroom wall. Our builder demolished the wall with the intention of putting in a large sliding glass door.

Unfortunately the sliding doors were out of stock at that particular moment.

Which left a great hole in our lives.

We progressed by trial and error.

"Don't you think this room is a little dark?" I asked the builder tentatively while checking one of the new bedrooms.

"Ah, yes, Mrs Lazar," he said genially. "It does seem a little gloomy, doesn't it."

Now they always say you should never tell an expert how to do his job so I felt a little reluctant to point out the fact that the room had no windows which made it darker than usual.

"You're absolutely right," he said. "A window or two would make all the difference."

Then came the day they fitted the new door to the diningroom.

"Look, do you really think this is right?" I said to my husband as we crawled in sideways.

I must say, our builder was terribly obliging and put the door in upright the following day.

There were other minor little irritations like the handles that were left off the new kitchen door leaving us locked there overnight, the electricity supply that was cut off for three weeks and mistakenly buried in the compost heap.

The downstairs toilet was connected to the washing machine and the ceiling of the same toilet was inadvertently lowered by two metres which meant we could only enter that small chamber bent over double.

But things are progressing.

Why only yesterday my husband asked the builder when he thought he might be finished.

A man of few words, he smiled: "I think I can say with certainty that you'll be able to celebrate Christmas of 1983 in the completed house of your dreams."

This morning we sold my car and bought a caravan.

Only as a temporary measure, you understand.

For the next two years or so.

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