Snakes & Ladders & Roller Coaster Rides

I almost deleted yesterdays posts as it was all emotion and self indulgence but then I thought, No I wont because this blog has to be honest and sometimes during this process there is moments of raw emotion when your still trying to figure everything out and doing that is just as much about rebuilding as slapping up wallpaper is. If I wrote a blog/book that was all sunshine and flowers it would just be another DIY manual and thats not what this is all about at all. Its about getting over the heartbreak of loosing someone in whatever way it happens, of rebuilding yourself and rebuilding a life that has been changed when you didn't want it to be. My story is about doing that through property developing as a way of restoring self worth and a sense of positive achievement when everything else has felt like a massive failure. It is tough process, it is a roller coaster and once the house is rebuilt and I am rebuilt there will be a happy ending but right now its still a work in progress and sometimes I feel like I'm back to square one.
I'm not of course, I've come so far and when the dust settles (no pun intended) I see that but when I'm in the midst of confusion and pain again its important to acknowledge it's happening, to be real and honest on here. This weekend I felt the need to connect with someone who had been through something similar. You can feel so utterly alone, like the whole world is living a wonderful life without you and over a year on from my separation could I really drag it all up with friends again?
No, I needed to find some answers somehow to help me get back up because I was drowning, so I sat and re-read a blog that had inspired me. A lady who's partner had died suddenly of a heart attack and she had begun her blog after a year of hiding in her flat, sleeping, crying, drowning. I didn't know she had done that as I joined her blog some time down her line when she had progressed it into a new business that had become about her beautiful photography, posted when she had recovered enough to open her front door and venture out, a little further every day, camera in hand. I had never really read the beginning posts as what I needed from her then was her photography skill and although I mimiked her with my photography blog as a way of connecting with my Father and Grandmother who had just died I didn't feel the need to go back into her pain.
But that was just what I hoped to get from her this weekend in an attempt to not feel so utterly isolated inside Ambleside with the curtains firmly closed on what was the warmest sunniest day of the year so far. And that is what I am hoping one day to give others from my writing.
I have formed an opinion of her from her daily posts, an independent women, five years on from her heartbreak with two books in publication, a new home and a new search for love. Could this women who I admire and strive to emulate have ever been as lost, as insecure, as broken as I felt and would her blog hold some answers for me? I went back to her beginning. For the last two days I have read each heartbroken, soul searching post that she wrote back then. I have read her words on her bad days, her words on her good days when she felt she was recovering and her words on the days she slipped right back to the start again.
This heartbreak business is like a game of snakes and ladders and to see her climbing the ladders and sliding back down the snakes just like me was as comforting as having great big arms wrapped around me, arms that I haven't had for so long and that I miss so much. To see that she felt the same way I do after a whole year made me see that I wasn't going crazy, that I was just still grieving for the love I'd lost. Each set back opened up all the cracks in the plaster that I was trying so hard to fill, just as it had with her and it was such a relief to read someone else going through the same thing, just as confused, just as scared. Because she was brave enough to put her innermost raw feelings out there all those years ago, she helped me so much this weekend.
It was wonderful to read her slow recovery, to ride her lonely roller coaster with her to where she is now and to know that if she can do it, I will do it too. One day I will be in her shoes ready to face the world again and maybe one day someone will be reading my words and it will help them too. I will write and thank her for her honesty at that time and for not going back and deleting those posts.

First Look at Ambleside

THIS POST HAS ENDED UP IN THE WRONG PLACE, IT WAS ONE OF THE EARLIEST ONES!

So when I left I was homeless, literally. I had no rights to the home we'd created. Yup stupid, it had been an on-going bone of contention for years and had driven a wedge between us greater than even I realsied. I first saw Ambleside on an Estate Agents website and it was perfect. It had had some renovation but still needed an awful lot of work, it had new wiring and most importantly new central heating. I can't live without warmth and putting in heating was expense I didn't need as there was no double glazing which would be the first expense. I rang quickly as I knew it was exactly the type of property a...

landlord would snap up and I think I was one of the first people to view. It was very run down but it had a lovely feel to it as soon as you walked in despite the first impression, even the Estate Agent said she had a 'soft spot' for the house. Everyone who visited in the first few weeks I moved in, when it was in its rawest state, commented on the 'good feeling' Having surveyed a great many buildings in my working life, I have experienced the 'feel' of a building good or bad when there are no obvious reasons for either. I firmly believe that buildings absorb the 'energy' that exists within them over the years and it was obvious this little house had had some very lovely times. Despite its outward appearence, inside it was still smiling :-)

The Cat's Tail

So the cat’s tail didn’t fall off and slowly slowly the world is going back to normal. The black fog rolled away again and today I can just about make out the sound of birds singing in the distance. My 44 year old self knows to wait for this to happen, to pull the curtains, to let the minutes and hours just drift by and to wait for the calmness and positivist to come back. My younger self would let the fear take over and I would kick and scream at it until I had drained the demon out of it and the life out of everyone who had caused it. Now I hear the fear and I know to wait, to walk away from those people, to nurture me and not fight them. I hear the voice inside now that says ‘its hurting me’ and I tell that voice it’s going to be okay, that I don’t have to panic and react.

That voice came last week after a row with my son over my asking him to help with the fencing, it was the last straw in a week where everything came at once, as things have a habit of doing. I could feel my throat tightening, my instinct to fight growing and I calmed it. I closed the door, physically and metaphorically on him and the events that were threatening my peace of mind and told myself, no, they will all wait until I have decided what to do. The world pushes you to act now, to make a decision now, that everything is urgent. It isn’t.

Sometimes I go to a very deep, dark place, it frightens me but I’ve been there before, several times and although the panic makes me wonder each time if I can climb back out, now I try to keep calm and I wait. Another voice inside me says that there is so much happiness and beauty still to come, that the world is a magical place and I have still got so much to see and experience. That voice is really quiet at first, sometimes I can’t even hear it but I give it time to surface. I give my voices time to talk to each other and I go into a kind of trance and just wait. A sleeping, sofa laying on, TV watching trance and I wait, I wait until that energy kicks back in and my inner voices are singing the same tune and my subconscious mind and soul figure it all out. I trust myself now and I let it happen.

I can do this of course because I live in my own house and I don’t live with another adult that is judging, pushing, intolerant to any disturbance, even when it is disturbance they have caused. If I had had this skill before now and it’s a skill my counsellor has helped me nurture, then calmness would have helped me walk away from situations that weren’t good for me much earlier and I wouldn’t have inflicted so much damage on myself. Yes I take full responsibility for that. The actions of the people weren’t good but it was my choice to continue to expose myself to those actions and that was not the other persons responsibility it was mine. By exposing myself again and again to something that had caused pain before and by continuing to have the same fight reaction with no positive result, the outcome was only ever going to be the same, more pain. I can see, reading back over my diaries of years and years, that I was half way there. I was doing the talking to myself part but only after the initial meltdown reaction when rawness and a natural instinct to ‘get back to normal’ was overwhelming. Like a child whose been smacked by a parent I ran straight back into the arms of the smacker so that love and normality could be restored.

I’ve also learnt that I’m an ‘endurer’ I put up with and live with and paper over the cracks of things that I should walk away from because they don’t suit the me inside. I try to change, to fix, to nurture and battle on with in the hope that the bits I don’t like will all melt away and my world will be sparkly and perfect.

Now I don’t have the time or the energy to fix anyone else, to put myself through it and endure. I have gravitated in my life towards people with issues, many caused in childhood and I have given all of my energy over to supporting them and excusing them and trying to heal them and I’m not doing it anymore, not partners and also after this last week not my son. I’m sure those people would tell you I did nothing for them, as they have told me over and over again when I was with them. Those sorts of people are spongers, soaking in and draining out all of the energy of the people they have chosen to be with to make themselves feel better but they don’t care what effect that has on the person they are with, they don’t even see the damage they’re causing and nothing you ever do for them is ever enough. I’m not prepared to be anyone’s clown again, anyone else’s sparkle and I’m certainly never again going to try to be anyone’s healer again. Now I’m fixing me and you can all go away until I’m done. 

I asked my councillor if I was in danger of alienating everyone in my life and that one day my door would stay closed and curtains drawn for good. She pointed out that I have lots of people in my life, some of them I have had for a very long time and she asked me to tell her what behaviour each one was displaying that I really shouldn’t tolerate, that wasn’t compatible with the me inside and that I should in my new calm logical state walk away from. That was a revelation, as I realised there were people that I had really healthy relationships with, people that hadn’t hurt me at all and that I had no inner instinct voice telling me to walk away from. I had relationships that weren’t hard, draining, a work in progress, they were just ‘right’ as they were. I wasn’t hurting those people because they felt I hadn’t given them what they needed, they were perfectly happy with me, most of the time, because they had chosen wisely too and nothing about me and my personality, morals or goals was giving them any real cause for concern.

Wow this is a new understanding, new ground for me and I love it. Sometimes the developing that I’m doing isn’t on the house, it’s on me and like I said I’m building us both back up to be structural sound.   

Developing Snobbery

I've done my fare share of DIY but tiling is beyond me. In my book there is nothing worse in a house than wonky tiling as it always seems such a shame when tiles are so perfectly square to then slap them on higeldy piggldy, its a crime! The men who came to start my bathroom, who have now disapered in a puff of smoke spaced the tiles using bits of folded up tile box instead of plastic spacers and they have been cut in the style of a three year old using a pair of blunt scissors, rather than a professional tile cutter. All in all they look hideous and will have to come off.

A buyer would walk in and think "I'll need to completely re-tile this bathroom" just because there is shoddy tiling around the bath. I'm livid. The tiles are cheep but the finish shouldn't be, theres nothing that devalues a house more than bad workmanship and they've made me an extra job and caused me extra expense that I didn't need. I'm not going to mention the drip on the back of the toilet thats running down and discolouring the kitchen ceiling or the fact that the sink has been fixed to the wall too high because thats where the old sinks waste pipe came out, which means the bottom is now resting on a pile of broken tiles, oh I just did.
Sooo the tiler I used to lay the tiles in the kitchen lays tiles for a countrywide coffee chain and I was guessing they didn't take on anybody who was going to do a slap up job but I was still nervous. I'd had someone lay very expensive tiles in a previous house that warrented them but the finish was awful and the jutty out bits tripped up several people who came to visit. Yes I'm OCD about tiles.
My tiler came and he wasn't impressed with the tiles that I'd purchased. I informed him that my partner and I had in our time bought very high end tiles for our home but that I was developing and tiles from such as  Pietra Firma would be rediculous in this type of house which was more suited to Tiles Direct  so he could just go on and lay those lower quality tiles and we'd say no more about it. It was a distatefull exchange and I realised that I had fallen foul of that developers curse 'pretense before profit'
My designer hackles were up and I was on the defensive trying to show him who I really was and how dare he try to make out that I was.....but hold on a minute what was going on here? I'd be in that bathroom showroom buying the most expensive tap they had before I knew it if I wasn't careful and then the penny dropped. Suddenly the fact that I'd bought those particular tiles and was putting them in this particular house signified my bottom rung of the ladder developing status. It was time to have a word with myself. Taking on this kind of project as a women alone was a brave thing to do and I reminded myself that I'd bought those tiles with my hard earned and what a clever girl I'd been to get such a bargin. Developing teaches you a lot more about yourself than just how to master DIY and I had learned an important lesson yet again. The tiling in the kitchen was fabulous, so neat and I was thrilled!

Money worries

Last week was one of the worst weeks I'd had in a long time, I'm doing some intensive work with my counsellor and she had warned me that I would feel 'unbalanced'. I told her that I didn't want to drag it all up again as it felt like I was making huge strides and I felt that there was no point but she assured me that all the feelings are still inside and need to be let out so that I can be freed. I liked the sound of the freedom part but I'm not liking the unbalanced at all. I don't want to feel angry, resentful, hurt again, I've had enough of that but I just cant seem to get out from under the cloud of it all and the cloud descended again last week - big time!
My car broke down on New Years Eve, a big breakdown that threatens to send it up to Mercedes heaven and although for the first month I was all positive and prepared to take the time to decide what to do, walking to work and back and researching train fares, it all came crashing down around me last week. We had a bad storm and all that remained of the battered fencing held together by washing line and hope in the back garden, finally gave up the ghost and an expensive job that I was hoping to put off just that bit longer needed to be done urgently. My neighbours have a three year old, two dogs and a short fuse so the holes in the fencing were a worry and a pot that was being to boil more fiercely as each month went by. In this country the rule is that the fencing on the left side of your garden is your responsibility and during my time on this earth I have concluded that nothing causes more arguments between neighbours than boundary's (apart from badly parked cars but we'll get to that in a minute)
So before the pot boiled over completely, and having heard my neighbour boil I wasn't at all keen to have it happen in my direction, the money that had made the car disaster feel not too disastrous had to be used to buy fence panels instead and to pay for a man with tools and strength to do the job. Well, I reasoned, still quite positive at this point, it was on the list to do and was all an investment in the house so the bathroom could wait another couple of months and I could carry on walking a bit longer as the exercise was doing me good.

But with a bad cold and bad weather getting me down that resolve had slipped last week and to top it off it just so happened that on the day I parted with that money, over £700 another neighbour decided to get nasty about where the recovery truck had left my unshiftable car and that helpless, alone, whoa-is-me feeling descended again like a tonne of bricks. Something would have to be done about the car - more money - and then just in case I had an ounce of inner strength left, the cat was bitten again by the neighbourhood monster cat which preys on every moggy in the area on a regular basis and before his tail falls off completely a large vet's bill could be on the cards. Great.

I went from feeling proud of myself, competent and capable in my new life to scared and shattered again in less than a week. Did I mention the gas and electricity bill?

Shopping for floor tiles

I got lucky with the tiles, my local DIY shop was clearing out their tile display to make room for a new one and were selling off tiles at £3 a box for 10! I took every box they had of two particular types, some for the kitchen, some for the bathroom, everything I needed for £187. They're not the best quality tiles in the world by any stretch of the imagination but tiles are something you can go utterly crazy on and blow your budget royally if your not careful. Its very temping when developing to choose the tiles that you like yourself or worst still choose the ones on the amazing displays in the shop but what looks good in the 40sq foot bathroom display in the high end designers showroom is going to look pretentious in a tiny terrace and will still cost you a tidy packet. Kitchens and bathrooms are a big danger zone when your developing. Of course the simple hot and cold small single tap looks nothing next to the great big shiny £600 designer one but its a question of self discipline. You have to take your designer head off and put your business one on. Your house has a ceiling price, that is what it will be worth when you sell it. Take the price that you bought it for away from the ceiling price that your house will fetch once its all done and your left with a figure. Out of that figure will come how much it has cost you to do the all of the work and whats left is your profit. If your like me your wanting to make as much profit as possible so that developing figure needs to be as low as you can get it without compromising on the overall finish.What I mean by that is that theres a standard of developing that fits each house, if you have a small terrace like Ambleside you wouldn't put in granite floor tiles, a house at that price level just simply doesn't warrant it. The people who come to buy that kind of house won't be expecting it, they'd be thrilled to bits of course and you won't see bigger smiles as they skip round but it won't influence their decision on how much money they would pay for the overall house. However if the buyers where looking for a higher end house, say a five bedroom family home and they walked into the kitchen and were met by cheep lino then that would make a difference and they would immediately be calculating what a new floor would cost them to put in. If this were to happen in several areas of the house then they would be looking to reduce their offer to cover the work that they would feel they had to do to bring the house up to standard. Its a tricky area of property developing and the one that a lot of people fall down on, its worth setting a firm budget before you even start the work for each room of the house and trying your darnedest to stick to it. You can visit a few houses that are on the market which are the same as yours just to get a picture of what that standard is if your not sure but don't fall into the trap of thinking "if I make my house look a million dollars than the buyers will want mine rather than the ones I've seen" They will but the benefit will be all theirs, you won't end up with a million dollars in your pocket, your pockets will be empty! Worst still the house will be so 'you' that you won't want to leave and won't be able to afford to leave anyway as you'll have no money to put into a new house.I know that all sounds dramatic and a bit preachy but I've done it. Sarah Beeny would be very cross with us!