Tuesday 7 July 2026: Renovation plans

Right, we seem to be back to normal again now with the blog posts. Today’s is all about Friday and tomorrow’s will be the weekend and Monday.

I couldn’t take the dog out first thing as I was expecting a parcel and all Royal Mail would tell me was that they ‘aimed’ to get it to me ‘between 8:05am and 12:05pm’. So that kinda tied up my morning until they got here. They did have instructions on where to leave it if I was out, but as this was the first time they’d be delivering a parcel to us, I wanted to be here…

…saying that, we did have a delivery on the Sunday before (yes, a Sunday, so unlikely to be Royal Mail), and they pushed a card into the letterbox on the front of the house (not the one in the ‘front’ door, but more on that in a bit) saying where they’d left the package. Maybe I was giving them a disservice…

Of course, I couldn’t explain that to the dog and a couple of times he came to remind me we were supposed to be going for a walk. In the end he entertained himself zooming in and out of the house and around the garden with a squeaky toy. (A green beefburger, if you’re interested.) (Hamburger.)

There was washing in the basket but not enough to justify a full washload. Impressed with myself for catching up so quickly, I didn’t bother putting it through. Instead, I washed the dishes from the night before. Normally, this is a chore the poet does and I put them away. But as we don’t have a dishwasher anymore, he’ll wash them if he feels like it (after cooking our evening meal), or I’ll do them in the morning when I feel like it, and sometimes when we don’t feel like it.

Now then, that ‘front’ door. It’s not at the front of the house at all. It’s at the side of the house. And it’s the only outside door. I’m not a fan of side doors into properties. Our last house had one that quite a few visitors went to, but I always used the front door, unless I was getting into a car, in which case I’d use the side door because in my experience, side doors usually lead to a garage.

I think not having a proper ‘front’ door on the front of the house is confusing to visitors and to anyone trying to deliver something. The door goes into a very short hallway, or lobby or, as I call it. the Gallery…and then there’s a side door leading to the kitchen and a door directly opposite the main entrance door leading into the living room (Parlour and Formal Dining Room).

I want to move this lobby to the front of the house and move the kitchen backwards into where the lobby currently is. Then I’d like to move the door to the actual front of the house, where there’s currently a window. I’d keep a door off the lobby into the kitchen, and I’m toying with keeping the current living room door or moving that into the new lobby as well. If we move the lobby to the front of the house, and put a central door in, we *might* be able to install a separate toilet/cloakroom too.

At the same time I’d put a French door in the study (Estate Manager’s Office) into the back garden. The study is officially bedroom 2 (Guest Bedroom), but I think a French door into a garden from a spare bedroom is quite nice, it would give us a back door into the garden, rather than having to go through the ‘front’ door and around the side, and the dog would enjoy sitting on the step sniffing the fresh air and watching the birds through the open door.

But it’s all structural and it might be out of our current budget. So, for now, we’re just replacing the windows and doors with straight replacements but with a view to swapping the front door and the kitchen window around.

Only one other bungalow on our road has moved the front door from the side of the house to the front of the house. I don’t think we need planning permission if there’s already an opening there, i.e. the window. But it is recommended that we get a certificate at least from the planning department to say we don’t need the permission. We will still need a building regulations certificate and obtaining the planning certificate will take just as long as obtaining planning permission. But it will be considerably cheaper, I think.

I also think we need planning permission if we’re changing an obscure glazed door in the side elevation to a clear window as most side elevations overlook the property next door. Ours, however, does not. It overlooks the end of the garden of a property the next road over.

While we make up our minds, we’re resisting replacing the entire kitchen. We will be putting an oven where a chest of drawers is, and we’re hanging a new door (if the joiner ever gets back to me – I think I’ll be finding a different joiner…). But we’re resisting replacing the kitchen until we know what the future layout may be.

We are going to put a new bathroom in. The current one is very tight around the toilet and the wash hand basin and we were toying with replacing the elongated shower tray with a bath with shower over. I think we’ve conceded, though, that a shower would be better in the long run, both with a view to our ages and to give us a bit more room in the bathroom. I think the bathroom fitters may be our next phone call.

I rattled all of that off and there was still no sign of our postie or our parcel, so I turned instead to the first of the overdue book reviews, which appeared on here yesterday. That should have been a quick job, but I had to create the graphics first, and, of course, everything was on the desktop and not the laptop. Again, I thanked my past self for remembering to do backups and was able to grab the necessary files from the portable hard drive. I did have to go online, though, to get the book covers for this book review and the next book review, and I made the mockups in PhotoPea.

Next, while I still awaited the postie, I shared Friday’s blog post to Medium and I collected the Instagram graphics from Patreon so I could share Thursday’s and Friday’s posts on IG.

The poet called to say he was on his way home and as I hadn’t taken the dog for a walk yet, we decided we’d all go together later in the day. He had to go into one of the factories so he had a good, strong internet signal for the work he had to do, but the rest of it he was able to do offline at home, on the other side of the temporary office desk in the living room.

By 1:45pm there still hadn’t been any delivery, so I logged on to the company’s website and opened a customer services chat where the robot said it was putting me through to a human being. Thirty minutes later I was still waiting and I was using up data on my phone. So I disconnected. Not great customer service for a new customer. They must be awful for existing customers. Can’t wait for them to ask me to leave them a review…

The internet connection got slower and slower, so I finished everything I wanted to do online and switched back to offline again. The parcel finally arrived at about 2:30pm, 2½ hours later than the bottom end of their estimate. It wasn’t the postie’s fault, and she was cheerful, chirpy, polite and friendly. It’s the service that’s broken, and it’s getting worse. They should have the ‘Royal’ part of their name removed.

We were going to choose the oven and the fridge/freezer Saturday morning, so while I carried on just reading for the rest of the day, and doing other things that didn’t need the internet, the poet took all the measurements. And I finished early after a reasonably busy week, although I didn’t really have much work to show for it.

This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.