A Month Since The Move

This week has seen Dawn spending all day on a mini-digger, preparing the base for building the new studio on, which arrives in the next few weeks.  This involves digging out the rectangle footprint to a certain depth, filling it with rubble, then earth, then subbase, then sharp sand, compacting it all with a compression plate and topped with plastic grids and gravel. It all forms a solid base without it being concrete. Obviously, I didn’t know anything about this but as usual Dawn researched it all. 

The result is the back garden looks like a building site. The soil is really fine, quick draining and sandy. We’ve so many boxes of art materials that are destined for the studio that until it’s built we’ll be living around dozens of plastic boxes.

In fact, it’s exactly a month since we moved and to be honest, we were thinking about the move for up to a year and in the last few weeks it was all consuming, so much so that neither of us can remember a time when we weren’t preoccupied with moving or getting prepared to move. So it’s left a big hole, replaced by sorting everything out, of course. I don’t know what to do without being preoccupied with it. I think it’ll take a few months to actually start to be able to actually live normally.

In common with many men, I leave all the interior decor to Dawn.The whole house needs carpeting, which we’ve got bundled under polythene and tarpaulins in the garden. Big sheets of hardboard are in the house waiting to be upstairs flooring. She’s done the living room. We also need vinyl flooring for the kitchen and bathroom which also needs tiling and a new bath and sink. And kitchen cupboards need taking out and replacing with shelves and racks. I sit and watch her do this, as I would even if I wasn’t disabled. Fortunately, we have similar tastes in decor, or it may be true that I don’t really care that much and just go along with her choices. Both could be true! She always makes things look nice though.

Meanwhile, we’ve not done much DJTees work, except I’ve been trying to unpack everything I know about the business in order to create a reference pack for Andy. This is much harder than it might seem because you don’t realise what you know about a business you’ve run  for over 23 years. I think I’ll take a few weeks to do it because things keep occurring to me. We’ve not set a date yet for Andy to take the reins, there’s no rush and much to sort out and put in place. It feels odd, we planned for all of this to happen and one way or another it has, even though there have been many struggles along the way.

So on we go with many new developments in the pipeline. Sad we said goodbye to Dave Mason this week, he meant so much to me as a teenager. Time never stops moving.