He's sooo skinny

OMG!! He's Back!

After 7 weeks sleeping rough, our beloved and gorgeous little boy is home! After a tip off yesterday and some heavy duty staking out, Prodigal Primo has been secured and returned home safely! It's a bit of a long story (which I will elaborate on soon), but the up shot is the lil fella is home and sleeping next to Pix as I type this. Ahhh bless, life can now return to our version of normal.

Day 3: Bugger all to report

Apparently 1 day equals a handful of floor boards stripped of nails and some insulation put up in a ceiling. Does 3-4 weeks means something different in Polish? .... like 3-4 months maybe? Oh dear. Here's some pics to keep you busy.

2 days, same mess, no real progress.

Starting to think my conservative doubling of the builders' timeframes might not be so conservative after all. At least it was sunny, which provided the younger Poles with enough reason to work without shirts. As Francesca put it, "There were far too many moobs and muffin-tops on display." Not pleasant.

1 day and a lot of mess

Finally building work has commenced in Chez Box. The Polish builders have made up for being almost 2 weeks late starting by making an incredible mess after just one day. I like to think that the size of the mess is equal to the amount of productivity, and as such, we will be finished this project ahead of time. I believe they call this blind faith. Nothing seems to be too much trouble for the Poles, with most of my requests (some as ridiculous as asking them to remove hundreds of nails from our Welsh floorboards) proving no bother. "It be fine" is the standard reply, whereas an English builder would still be grimacing with "Oh mate, that's not going to be cheap." God bless the Polish.

Our day trip to Wales, or as the Welsh say... 'beth 'r annwfn did e jyst ddeud?'

With our current house renovation project about to kick off, I thought it might be a good idea to chronicle the process. As with our previous project, I am expecting DYI disasters, living with few amenities and lots of dust. However, the biggest difference with this project will be that we're getting builders in to do the vast majority of the work, and they will turn it around within about 2 months (we hope!). They're already a week and a half late starting the work, so we're off to a terrific start.

The weekend before last Pix and I took a drive to Wales to pick up some floor boards that were salvaged from an old school. To be completely honest, I am not sure why we did this as it was a helleva lot of work, but it was kind of fun getting into a van for a road trip, playing daft games like Geography for literally hours.....!

Things we've recently accomplished:

• Found a paint that we like (this has taken us weeks)
• Bought 4 old church chairs for the living room
• Moved all our stuff into storage (hopefully making the whole thing a lot easier)
• Pretty much got the lighting plan sorted

Things we need to get sorted soon:

• Get B&Q to colour match the paint we found, as the sample we like is from the world's most expensive supplier (£40 per tin I believe!!)
• Find kitchen units and doors for kitchen
• Manage to convince the Polish builders that they should actually start the project
• Further convince them that they don't mind doing all the work required on our dodgy floor boards (i.e. pulling out all the old nails, cleaning, sanding, varnishing and polishing them). I am hoping this request will be met with the typical Polish reply of "No problem, it be fine. We do."

I've included some pictures below to give you some indication of how the flat is looking and the state of the floorboards. I promise I wil try to keep this updated regularly through the project so you can all be impressed with the pain that we seem to put ourselves through.

Much love to all x

Lost Cat

Our little primo has been missing for over 3 weeks now. Please come home Primo.