Almost three years ago I moved into my own house.  That was about six months later than I was meant to move into my house and if that was the only problem I had endured, that would have been just fine.  It is amazing that so many people have a vision of building their own house, because when you do, people say that it is the most stressful experience that you will go through, apart from divorce.  That sounded a little bit exaggerated, until I went through it and three years later, I wake up every single morning to hordes of workers arriving at my house to start digging and filling holes while they try to ensure that the drainage system is working perfectly or repair parts of the garden and lawn which have been damaged by the drainage people.  

They appear to have burst a pipe to the pool so that has to be fixed too so the filtration can work.  When I sit in my home office, I have workers walking past me most of the day and the fun is only just about to begin with fixing the latent defects in the house.  That has taken many hours of meetings with builders, lawyers, advocates and friends who have helped me with the task, but soon I will have the added pleasure, three years after moving in, of waking not only to workers and plumbers in my garden, but builders inside the house as well attending to repairs!  It is no wonder that so many people choose well-built second-hand houses to buy and don’t go through all the teething problems that one gets with a new house (which one would have imagined would be perfect) and sorting it all out.  There is always a litany of new nightmares – the person who seeded your garden with winter grass, promising you that your lawn would remain green the whole of winter for three years at least, was lying.  The person who put in your irrigation system in the garden did not use proper insulation cables from point to point, but to save money, and that seems to be a common trend in the building industry, instead used inferior telephone cables in certain points just to maximise profits.  That also all has to be redone.  Eventually, and especially after three years, you become almost immune to it.  You are used to strangers in your house every day, it seems quite normal to hold one or two meetings every single week about different problems and when people tell you that everything will be fixed in three months’ time, although you would like to believe it, you know it is probably really in six months’ time.