Building

Our year has been dominated by buildings, and problems with them. After herculean efforts doing two complete renovations, both boys are now on the property ladder, each in a 2 bedrooom flat near Vauxhall and sharing with friends. We nearly killed ourselves, twice over, for 3 months each, trying to coordinate renovations during the pandemic, and ended up doing way too much of it ourselves as successive builders vanished.
Luckily, friends helped out - Tom helping us fix brickwork up a scaffold and advising throughout on pipes and plumbing.

Then there's the saga of the beach house in Croatia, with it's 1980s plumbing and wiring; after years talking about it, we hope the renovation is happening. We spent 3 exhausting days clearing out 4 decades of clutter and old furniture.

Meanwhile at home we had damp problems with the neighbours' drive against our wall, which took forever to resolve and caused us a lot of stress (as well as damage to our study wall). We also had to dig a hole in the kitchen floor (mercifully finding the sagging tiles were a broken timber and not damp-rot). Our own home still awaits serious attention, with a new kitchen and rear needing doing in 2022 or 2023, but we can't face that just now.

And we all have some skills we did not a year ago...