“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”

Mike Tyson

I promised in my last post that would I bring the gentle reader up to date with our progress with regard to the plans and resolutions that I boldly (or not-so-boldly) outlined in my customary start-of-the-year posting way back in January (different month – same lock-down!).

The observations that I made concerning work have panned out exactly as predicted: The Girl is working mostly from home and – though I didn’t teach during the winter term – I am currently in the early stages of a condensed version of the course that I taught last fall. Apart from being somewhat frenetic (since fourteen weeks worth of material is compressed into seven weeks) it seems to be going reasonably well thus far. Frankly the coursework delivery itself is not much of an issue. Doing the marking is more of a struggle.

I posted recently an update on my musical activities, so that just leaves one… big… area to deal with. There it is in the corner of the room… large, grey and with tusks and a trunk!

Given that travel (and much, much else) is currently out of the question we had decided that we would focus this year on carrying out renovations in our basement, to complement that which we did a few years back on the main floor (see pretty much any of my posts from late 2017/early 2018). We engaged a designer to come up with some proposals and contacted our exemplary contractor who did such a wonderful job upstairs and with our deck.

Well – these things all take time but we had hoped that we would be carrying out the desired works about now. We planned to turn the half-bathroom downstairs into a full bathroom – we aimed to replace the kitchenette – we decided to replace any of the windows that had not been done in the earlier project and we had the bright idea of carving out a fitness room from the large but relatively little used downstairs family room. Finally we would make good the remaining spaces and redo the flooring throughout. Although this would have involved a fair bit of work it was nothing compared with the extensive works we had had done back in 2017/18 and we anticipated that a budget of approximately 50% of what we had spent last time would suffice.

What we should have foreseen (particularly as our contractor warned us that this was going to be the case) was that the cost of building materials had not only shot up as a result of shortages arising from the pandemic lock-downs, but that they were continuing so to do. Even thus forewarned his initial estimate for the job came as a serious shock, equaling the figure that we had spent on the entire main-floor renovation a few years back.

Well – we simply don’t have that sort of money and we really don’t feel inclined to borrow at this point in our lives… particularly given the uncertain situation in the wider world.

Having thought long and hard we went back to our contractor with a proposal for a greatly stripped-down project – pretty much just sorting out the bathroom and replacing old windows. When the quote for this lesser work came back it proved still to entail spending a large sum of money and we once again found ourselves reluctant to give the go ahead.

And that is where we currently are. We don’t feel inclined to spend this sort of money on parts of the house that will be used chiefly by visitors from abroad (who knows when we will see any of them again?). There is also considerable uncertainty as to what will happen to material costs once the pandemic recedes. We would be really annoyed if we found that could do the job for significantly less simply by waiting for a year or so.

All of this naturally leaves us feeling somewhat down-hearted. The project had in part been intended as a focus for the year – given that travel was out of the question.

Now we will just have to think of something else.