The £22 kettle is still on the worktop. It has a slightly wobbly lid, a water gauge you can no longer read and a base that has never once been wiped by me when it needed it. A year ago today it was in a carrier bag on the back seat, because the real kettle was in one of 58 boxes and we hadn't a hope of finding it.
Completion was confirmed at 2.15pm on Friday 31 January 2025 and the keys were in Matt's hand at 2.40pm. A year on, on the same Saturday, the number I care about is in pencil on the inside of the meter cupboard door, just under Dennis's notes from the 1990s. It's a tally Matt started on moving day, and it says 112.
The count
That is how many cups of tea we have made for people working on the house. Two sets of pencil on one door, thirty years apart, feels about right. Eighty-two of the brews went to tradespeople. The big ones:
- The two electricians who fitted the consumer unit in one day, 10 brews.
- The plasterer who did the back bedroom ceiling over two days, 10.
- The roofers and gutter job: 6 each for the tiles, the gutter and the chimney cowls.
- The extractor fan and the diverter valve, 5 each. The valve took two visits.
- The movers, 6, which seemed a lot until you remember they started at 8am.
The rest were smaller: the electrical report 4, the broadband engineers 4 over two visits, the joiner 4, the damp company and the independent surveyor 4 between them, the smart meter 3, the camera check in the cavity wall 3, the boiler service 2, the gas pipe check 2 and the plumber 2. The smart meter engineer had a brew and a biscuit, as the post at the time said, and then a second biscuit that he is unlikely to tell his manager about.
The other 30 were Kev. He doesn't count as a tradesperson, but he does count as a department. There was moving day with the trailer, the tip runs, the front path, the raised bed boards, the Christmas table and a number of Saturdays when he arrived "just to have a look". He has never once asked for a second cup. He has also never left with the first one finished.
At about 6p a brew, with tea bag, milk, sugar and a share of the electricity, the whole 112 comes to roughly £6.72. That's the best value in the house and it isn't in the tab.
What has changed
The electrics, mostly. The fuse board that rattled when I opened the cupboard door is now a tidy row of labelled switches, and I'm no longer asking myself what's behind the scorched socket in the kitchen. The kitchen is the same layout, but the cupboard doors are painted and the worktop joint is clean. In the front room the woodchip is gone, the 1930s tiled fireplace is out in the open, and the hall floor we finished this month means that for the first time you can see wood when you come in the front door.
Pickle arrived in May and changed the sound of the house, the state of the radiator shelf and the amount of cat food in the cupboard. The front bedroom floor is sanded. There's ethernet in the box room, and the heating now runs cooler than it did when we moved in. That sounds like a loss, but the gas figures say otherwise, and I'll write those up once the whole winter is in.
What hasn't
The bathroom is still peach. It has a fan now, and a re-grouted bath, and it is still peach. The back bedroom is still the coldest room in the house, because the gable wall hasn't stopped being a gable wall, and I've booked three people to come and look at it in February. Eleven of the 58 boxes are still in the loft. They're labelled "misc" in my own writing, by a woman who thought she'd be back for them in a week.
This morning, before I'd got the first brew down, there was a card on the mat. It had a robin on it. Inside, in Maureen's careful handwriting: "One year! Ron always said a house takes a year to tell you everything that's wrong with it. You're nearly there. Come round for a cuppa. M."
Brew count: 112.
