The panic of another season bore down on me as the builder boyfriend painted the breakfast room with the green paint I’d chosen. But he couldn’t paint fast enough for my liking and we started to have the most terrible rows. Despite us being fully booked last summer, I had come to the view that the whole thing wasn’t viable and we were bound to go under. I started looking up estate agents who market big old piles in Ireland to stupid people in America.
This house is like a monster devouring my money faster than I can feed it. I fed the beast by filling the oil tank to the brim at Christmas and it was a quarter gone by the new year.
The plumber turned up one night to tell us he really was going to come and finish the third bathroom he had walked away from after taking so much cash from me that I lost track of how much he had swindled by not finishing. In any case, he wants more money to finish it.
He said he would be with us the second week in January. And then he didn’t come. Of course he didn’t. So we have the same two B&B rooms, not three for the summer ahead. We are not expanding as planned, and with all the maintenance piled up from last season needing to be done before the first guests arrive in two weeks, it feels like we are going backwards. At this rate, the place will be less finished than last summer.
Trying to get anyone to do anything in Ireland is impossible, I see that now. I cannot skirt around it to be diplomatic. It’s just how it is and there’s no point pretending to myself or anyone else that it is not a nightmare. The BB has to do everything himself. No one ever turns up, no matter how much they say they are going to with a winsome smile and a flourish of blarney. They don’t come.
This house is like a monster devouring my money faster than I can feed it
Rightmove and its Irish equivalent, the aptly entitled ‘Daft.ie’, is chock full of big beautiful houses given up on because their owners are having to do everything single-handed at a snail’s pace, so the place deteriorates faster than they can hold it together.
I chose the Farrow & Ball shade of green I wanted in the hardware store, and after stripping the old wallpaper and spending days sanding the walls of the big formal dining room we use as a guest breakfast room, the BB painted a wall in the new green. I walked in and declared I really hated it.
It was the same when he finished painting the hallway pale yellow, over the deep peacock blue we had it last year. The second he finished, I stood there and said it was all wrong. Too much light. Walls too bare and blank looking. The blue was better.
He said he didn’t care that I didn’t like the yellow, and he said he didn’t care that I didn’t like the green. He had to go and put the towel rail back on the wall of the en suite in room four. Someone pulled it off by using it as a grab rail. And he disappeared upstairs.
Standing in the dining room, the ‘Saxon green’ walls closed in around me. ‘It’s like being inside a bowl of pea soup,’ I said, to no one. The sensation was all the more horrifying because the house has taken on human qualities, hostile and aggressive.
I am in the belly of the beast, and now the inside of the beast is bright green, as though it has absolutely gorged itself on mushy peas. This house is devouring me with a side order of peas, and there is nothing I can do about it.
For the next few days, the BB sanded and painted, and we argued and bickered about how we couldn’t possibly break even at the end of this season with two rooms only – so he better learn how to fit push-fit plumbing and do the new bathroom himself, as well as redecorate two more bedrooms – until one night it all came to a terrible head.
We’d rowed so much he was in one bedroom with the dogs and I was in another. Then, at 4 a.m., he flung open his door and the dogs leapt down the stairs barking their heads off and woke me from a deep sleep.
‘What the hell is going on?’ I yelled, as he came back up with the dogs after taking them out in the garden.
‘I didn’t do anything!’ he yelled.
‘What do you mean you didn’t do anything!’ I yelled. ‘The dogs have just barked the house down! What if we’d had guests?’
‘No they didn’t!’ he yelled.
‘How can you deny it? It just happened!’ I yelled.
‘It wasn’t both dogs barking!’ he yelled. ‘It was only Poppy! Dave didn’t bark!’
‘Are you insane?’ I yelled. I told him to put the darn dogs in the kitchen. This dog-on-the-bed row has gone on long enough. Whether we’re in the same bed or separate ones, the dogs are more important to him than me, clearly.
‘Dave gets frightened downstairs if the wind blows,’ he said, and went back to bed with the dogs.
I went back to bed but I couldn’t sleep. So I got up and slammed my door three times to wake him back up.
‘What the hell?’ he said, coming out of his room and standing in my doorway. I burst into tears, told him I couldn’t take it any more. I didn’t know what ‘it’ was. No idea. He stormed back to the other room. ‘Living with you is a nightmare that never ends!’ he yelled, and with such feeling it was really impressive. It made me feel much better.
‘Good,’ I thought, as I curled back up in bed. Good, I’m glad it never ends for you, because it never ends for me either. So we’re even.
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