Chapter 14
14
Another six weeks have passed and I’m pretty much back to my old self. What I’m struggling to understand now is how on earth I ever found time to work, let alone put in the long hours and late nights that I don’t miss at all. I seem to have embraced a life of leisure with surprising ease and, although I know I need to figure out a plan at some point, the cushion of my gardening leave and pay in lieu of notice means I’m in much less of a hurry than I was.
A lot of it is doubtless down to my blossoming friendship with Rebecca. Our weekdays tend to follow a pattern where she takes Rollo to school in the morning, and then we hit the gym together for an hour or so, always making sure to be back in time for Homes Under the Hammer , to which we’re both completely addicted. One of us will then make lunch, or sometimes we go out, and then she potters off to collect Rollo from school and I take care of any chores I need to do. I’m turning into a bit of a domestic goddess, even though I say so myself. Although I can still easily afford both Lukasz and Ramona, the cleaner from the same agency, I’ve decided to dispense with them and look after these things myself while I’m not working. It hasn’t been a complete success; in my enthusiasm, I over watered the hanging baskets at first, but a bit of online searching helped me to understand why the plants were looking considerably less healthy than they did under Lukasz’s care. Most of them have recovered reasonably well, but I did have to replace a couple and invest in some plant food to put back some of the nutrients I’d unwittingly leached out of the soil.
My cooking has improved in leaps and bounds too. The initial shepherd’s pie wasn’t a total disaster, but I didn’t season anything and the mash was underdone and lumpy. However, Mum and Rebecca have both taken me under their wing, and I’m developing quite an impressive repertoire. The freezer is now stocked with home-cooked meals for the rare nights when I don’t fancy preparing something from scratch, and my fridge and cupboards are full to bursting with healthy, fresh ingredients, along with an array of spices and seasonings. If Alasdair could see me now, I don’t think he’d recognise me. I do still think about him in idle moments, of course, but I expect he’s so busy he’s already forgotten about me.
It’s Wednesday today, or at least I think it is – weekdays tend to blur a bit now – and Rebecca and I are at mine, enjoying our post-gym cup of coffee in front of the TV. Today’s episode of Homes Under the Hammer features an ex-council flat (always a good investment, we agree, because they’re generally spacious and well built), a three-bedroom end-of-terrace house with a serious damp problem, and a detached house that the previous owner literally stripped back to a shell before promptly going bankrupt.
‘That’s a hell of a project,’ Rebecca remarks as the camera pans round, showing bare brick external walls and nothing else. ‘Where would you even begin with something like that?’
‘It could be fun,’ I reply, writing my estimate of how much the new owner is going to spend on my pad. This is a game we play every day. Each of us writes down how much we think it will cost to renovate the property, and the closest guess wins. There aren’t any prizes, but it keeps us entertained.
‘It doesn’t look like fun to me,’ she retorts. ‘It looks like it could fall down at any minute.’
‘Yeah, but you could put any layout you wanted in there. You literally have a blank canvas to play with.’
‘Go on then, what would you do?’
‘Assuming the external walls would take the load, I’d keep the downstairs fairly open plan, with a floating staircase against the right-hand wall. So, kitchen-slash-diner on the left there with living area on the right.’
‘I’m not sure about that. If you were cooking something like a curry, the whole house would smell of it.’
‘You’d need a powerful extractor fan, yes, but at least whoever’s cooking wouldn’t feel cut off from the rest of the family.’
‘Good point. And upstairs?’
‘Main bedroom with en suite. That’s a must these days. Depending on space, I’d put in two or three more bedrooms and a family bathroom.’
‘Sounds good. Can I make a suggestion?’
‘Of course.’
‘I think you’d need a study downstairs that was separate from the open-plan area. Lots of people work from home now, so you’d need to have that covered.’
‘Good point. Two and a half months out of a job and I’d completely forgotten that people work!’
We carry on watching as Gary, who owns the shell, outlines his vision for it. He’s going for some structural internal walls that will allow him to take part of the rear wall out and install bifold doors.
‘I mean, that could work too,’ I say to Rebecca. ‘I wonder if you could have the best of both worlds though, if you put in some massive RSJs to support the walls.’
‘Listen to you,’ she says, laughing. ‘Miss Construction Expert of the year.’
‘Technically, I’d be Ms Construction Expert, and anyway, you’re no better.’
The programme switches back to the flat for a while, and we watch in silence. However, it’s not a peaceful silence. Rebecca is chewing her lip thoughtfully, and glancing at me every so often.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘We should do this,’ she says, and I notice that her eyes have lit up.
‘What do you mean?’
‘OK, bear with me because I’ve only just had the thought and it’s not fully fledged yet. I have to sell my house once probate comes through, right?’
‘Yes,’ I say carefully.
‘And you don’t know what you want to do with your life, but I’m guessing it’s not going to be another high-flying city job.’
‘That’s a fair assumption, yes.’
‘So we both sell up, buy something at auction like these guys have, do it up, make fat profit, rinse and repeat.’
‘Are you mad?’ I ask her incredulously. ‘These people have all got experience, well, most of them. If we tried something like this, we’d probably end up with a Grand Designs -type disaster.’
‘You’ve got experience,’ she counters.
‘What?’
‘You did this place. And it’s stunning; you know how much I love your house.’
‘Yes, but I was lucky because I knew exactly what I wanted, and I had a good architect and a superb builder.’
She stares at me, excitement written all over her face.
‘You’re serious, aren’t you,’ I sigh.
‘There’s no harm in looking into it, right?’
It’s hard to refuse her when she’s this excited. ‘OK, let’s talk through how it might work,’ I offer. ‘Part one is we both sell up, right?’
‘Yes. It shouldn’t take long. Do you remember me telling you about the guy who came and valued my house a couple of weeks ago?’
‘Oily Pete?’
She giggles. ‘If you’d seen him, you’d realise how well that nickname fits him. Anyway, he was saying that there’s a lot of demand for properties round here at the moment. He reckoned he could even get a bidding war going on for my house, and it would probably sell in less than a week. And my house isn’t a patch on yours. He’d wet himself if he saw this.’
An image of a smarmy man in a suit with a damp patch at the crotch comes into my mind, and I hastily push it out.
‘OK, so Oily Pete has done the business and we’ve sold up. Where do we live while we’re tracking down this holy grail of a building project?’
‘I don’t know. Like I said, this idea isn’t fully fledged yet. We could rent somewhere, I guess.’
I think about her suggestion for a moment. ‘I don’t think that would work.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the letting agency would want to do credit checks and stuff. Neither of us being in any form of employment is going to be a red flag, I reckon.’
‘OK, park that one. I’ll think about it some more.’
‘Fine. Up pops the perfect property. We do our homework, we go to the auction and, incredibly, we win without going over our set budget.’
‘God, we’re good,’ Rebecca enthuses, punching the air. ‘Totally winning at life already.’
‘Slow down, tiger,’ I tell her with a smile. ‘Now we’ve got to find an architect who can turn our vision into drawings, get the relevant permissions if we need them, and find a builder who’s actually going to turn up and not charge us so much that we walk away with a thumping loss. A lot of the people on the programme are already in the trade, or have people who will do the work for mates’ rates. And we’d probably need to live there while the work was being done, to save money. I remember what it was like when I was doing this place up. It’s not a lot of fun. Oh, and we’ve got to do all of this without falling out.’
‘We won’t fall out.’
‘We might. My experience is that wherever there’s money and investment, there’s huge risk of conflict. What if I have my heart set on gold taps for the bathroom, but you want to spend the money on mood lighting in the kitchen?’
‘We have both.’
‘We’ve only got the money for one.’
‘Then we discuss like rational people and reach a compromise.’
‘Which is?’
‘The mood lighting, obviously. Gold taps are naff.’
Our laughter is short lived as the programme switches back to Gary and his shell of a house. It’s our favourite part of the show now; the camera focuses on various parts of the original house before a screen wipe to how it looks now. The screen wipe is always accompanied by a swishing sound that Rebecca and I imitate religiously, swiping our hands in front of our faces as we do.
‘Oh, that’s stunning,’ I breathe as feature after feature is revealed. ‘He must have gone over budget though, surely. There’s no way you could do that for sixty thousand.’
‘So, how much did you spend?’ the presenter asks on screen, and we both lean forward. I’ve written ￡100,000 on my pad and I reckon we’re going to be much closer to that than Rebecca’s estimated ￡55,000.
‘Well, I called in a few favours,’ Gary says, ‘and Bobbie and I did a lot of the decoration and stuff ourselves during the evenings and weekends, so we actually came in under budget at ￡52,000.’
Rebecca and I sit in breathless anticipation as two estate agents are brought in to value the property now the work’s been done. They’re both full of admiration for the high standard of fit and finish, and Gary and Bobbie are delighted to discover that they could make a potential pre-tax profit of ￡80,000 if they were to put it on the market.
‘I was hoping for sixty, so that’s a real bonus,’ Gary tells the presenter.
‘It’s a great result,’ the presenter agrees. ‘So, what now?’
‘Oh, Bobbie and I have already got our eyes on our next project,’ Gary says with a grin.
‘So there we are,’ the presenter concludes. ‘Join us tomorrow for another episode of Homes Under the Hammer .’
I turn off the TV and turn to Rebecca, who is still grinning manically.
‘That could be us,’ she says. ‘Eighty grand. Not bad, eh?’
I decide not to tell her that the salary Morton Lansdowne is still paying me is considerably more than that.
‘What about Rollo?’ I say, in my final attempt to defuse her. ‘He needs stability. You can’t keep pulling him out of one school and shoving him in another every time we start a new project.’
This does, thankfully, have the desired effect. ‘That’s a good point,’ she admits. ‘I guess we’d need to agree on the general area up front, so I could get him into a school and know he could stay there. Look. Nothing’s cast in stone, but it’s not a bad idea, is it? Think about it, at least?’
I smile at her. ‘I suspect it might be a totally crazy idea, but I promise I’ll think about it, yes.’
I’m in a reflective mood as I tidy up after lunch. Rebecca has headed off to collect Rollo from school, and I’ve got a pile of laundry that I’m planning to clear this afternoon. I don’t know how serious she was about her plan, but it certainly put a sorely lacking spring back in her step. The whole business with the house and her uncertain future has been preying on her mind a lot, particularly as Alice has informed her that probate is due to be granted in a week or two. Alice has offered to cover the mortgage for three months to give her time to sell, as they both agreed that was her only viable option. I’ve tried not to think about her moving away; she’s become such a big part of my life that I’ll really miss her.
As I load the washing machine, I replay our conversation in my head. Her idea is crazily impetuous, of course it is, but like all crazy, spur-of-the-moment ideas, there is a tiny nugget of genius in it. And, I have to admit, the idea of being my own boss really appeals.
We can’t do this, can we?