After a hugely stressful and incredibly intense nine months, it is hard to describe the sense of relief we feel in being able to take a more relaxed approach now that the roof is finished and the scaffolding is down. There's still so much to do - but at least we won't be feeling so pressured about the pace of work now.
Actually, there's so little pressure at the moment that we haven't done any work for a whole month and probably won't do anything else for the next month either. We're not intentionally taking such a long break; these periodic long gaps are mostly because André spends much of his time in New York, and when he's not here, everything grinds to a halt. Sometimes my own schedule plays into it too, though - I've just returned from New York myself, and next week I'm going on a business trip. Since I won't be back until early October, it doesn't really make sense for André to come here before then - which would make it almost two months since he was last here.
So, this is a big part of why we are still so far from finishing this flat - even though it's almost a year ago that we embarked on this project!
Although I've just noted that we'll enjoy being under less time pressure, we've realised that when we do resume work in a few weeks, we'll actually be confronted with yet another deadline of sorts: we better get cracking on installing radiators and getting the heat up and running before the cold weather sets in. In fact, we'll need to make absolutely sure that gets done during André's next two-week visit. We survived living here without heat last winter - but I don't really want to do it again!
