Forgive me. Bit of a moan incoming.
When April comes around this year, it’ll mean that for 20 of the last 24 months, we’ll have had building work happening on our doorstep. Not literally our doorstep, obviously. Our actual doorstep is perfectly functional, but rather small and ordinary. 20 months of building work on that would be both excessive and completely unnecessary.
But much of life over the last two years Chez 6000 has been accompanied by the sound of drilling, banging and angle grinding from the house next door and the house just across the road.
And I’m actually done with it now.
Just tired of it. Weary. Fed up. All the appropriate synonyms.
I know that building work has to be done sometimes, and I know that it is often, by nature, rather noisy. I’ve just had enough of it constantly being noisy around me.
And let’s not just leave it at the noise, because while that is very, very irritating, it’s far from the only issue which local building work brings with it. Driving is near impossible, the road is a veritable vehicular assault course of poorly parked bakkies. The tea breaks and lunchtimes spent on the grass verges generate a highly annoying amount of litter. Annoying because it’s sheer laziness, given that the builders have to walk right past a bin on the driveway on their way back into work.
And then there’s the petty crime. What used to be a very safe neighbourhood just isn’t at the moment. You need to double check all your gates, doors and windows. Repeatedly.
Anything metal will disappear from the outside of your property. Your recycling bags will be opened and ransacked and then left for the South Easter to do its job spreading stuff all over the driveway and road.
One neighbour remarked:
With so many builders around, petty crime is bound to happen.
Which might be true, but is also an pretty crap way of shrugging your shoulders and just accepting it.
Well, not on my watch, you bastards. Try me*.
But is the end in sight?
Possibly. I mean, they’ll run out of stuff to build in the end, won’t they? But I can’t see anything slowing down or finishing up in the next few months. And as I might have alluded to above, I’m really rather pissed off with the whole situation already.
.
* …again, because you’ve already nicked the letterbox off our front wall.