Piecing it together

Helpful tip: Never have your third baby and renovate your home in the same year. It's incredibly stressful!

So...this was the year the Bojjandi chose to make his appearance, as a happy surprise for us. And, as it turned out, the tenants from the ground floor finally packed up and left and we decided to rent their place also, since we had outgrown the space we had rented 6 years ago, when there were just the two of us and no Chubbocks or Puddi in our lives, with their 3 tons of toys and other gear. Dad manages the house for the owner, who lives overseas, so he did a full evaluation of the ground floor and discovered that the previous tenants had done little or no maintenance for the past 7 years - from things as small as leaking faucets in the kitchen to a bathroom which was neither used nor ever cleaned in the entire duration!

So the contractor and his men moved in mid-July, claiming that it would just take them a month to complete all the work - from repair work to correcting water seepage to waterproofing the outside of the house to repainting all 3 floors. They started with the ground floor and managed to complete it by around mid-September. From telling us that they would let us know a week in advance of when they wanted us to move out of the first and second floors, suddenly one day they landed up brandishing their tools and asking us to vacate immediately. The move was chaotic, not least because I was working insane hours at work and heavily pregnant. poor A ended up taking the brunt of it, and our stuff got hastily moved out of their way- clothes were bundled up in old bedsheets or into the cardboard carton the new fridge came in, the kitchen stuff was spread across three rooms by our helpful household staff, all sorts of things were crammed into two rooms + the kitchen on the ground floor.

The contractor and crew didn't finish their work until way after Bojjandi was born - in fact, they just finished middle of last month, and have left delightful little surprises for us. Shower and other curtain rods are missing, doors which used to lock earlier are now unlock-able and so on. There were some things that they just couldn't do, for instance cleaning up the weird stains on the mosaic floor...Meanwhile we had our hands full dealing with three kids and were at my mom's place for the last two and a half months post Bojji. A did some of the unpacking and setting up whenever he could, including organising our massive library, and I helped at odd intervals, when I could spare the time between Bojjandi's two and a half hourly feeds.

We finally moved back Sunday and I've already been back at work half days from the 1st of Dec. So we're back to hunting out spare moments when none of the three kids want attention and we're not wiped out and needing rest ourselves to piece the rest of the house back together. It's beginning to come together room by room and it's also amazing us how many things we (especially the children) have, because we sure didn't pay for most of their stuff...On the plus side, our efficient old live-in maid who'd gone away to her village for many months, is now back with us. I'm looking forward to the day when we've finally put away every piece of the puzzle in its rightful place and can heave a sigh of relief and joy. But the thing is, in Delhi, that's never a day of final reckoning, given the constant change of seasons...