We have building work going on so we are essentially living in one downstairs room and our bedroom. In the same room is a litter of puppies (planned for nearly four years) and an adult dog. The building work was not planned and was a spur of the moment decision by DH just after the puppies were conceived, so everything has been dug up/knocked down but now everyone’s stopped for Christmas and we just have chaos left outside where we’re putting a kitchen extension in.
We have taken all the upstairs back to brick, rewired, replastered, put all new doors and joinery in but it now needs painting, the second electrics fix hasn’t been done so there are minimal lights, and there’s no heating as we took the radiators out. Oh, and it’s just bare splintery floorboards.
I got rid of 80% of our stuff before we started, but the rest is in the one room we’re living in. I don’t have a single cupboard to store anything and we are really tight for space.
DH also decided to start ‘landscaping’ the back garden with a digger yesterday. Now there is no garden, only a muddy, soupy lake, so every time I go outside to put washing on/go to the freezer/put the dog out for a wee, mud gets everywhere. It rained last night and the garden is now flooded, so the dog has to be taken out of the front on a lead for every wee.
I’m also 25 weeks pregnant with twins. It’s like the perfect storm of chaos, but I’m managing.
He’s been working away Mon-Fri since the puppies arrived and the building work started, so hasn’t experienced the chaos fully until now. I’ve been stuck in one room with them all for weeks now, while plasterers and joiners and electricians banged and crashed indoors, and the foundations were dug for the extension outdoors.
The puppies are very very noisy a few times a day, it’s not their fault, they’re nearly ready to go to their new homes and they’re bored. They have a bit of garden fenced off to play in but it’s too cold for them to be out there for long.
Now, none of this matters to me. Puppies make noise, it’s been great for them living in the house with us and getting used to all the building noise, the house noises, and spending loads of time with people. They’re super confident, happy pups, but they do cry when they want to get out of their big pen or when I’m making their food. They also bomb about playing with their toys, growling at each other, crashing into things. They have half the room, we have the other.
DH’s reaction to it all is causing most of the stress. He’s off work now and completely intolerant of the normal puppy noise and the building mess. I’m doing 100% of the puppy and dog care, mopping the floors every two minutes, making all our food in our tiny makeshift kitchen, doing the all the washing in the outhouse. He literally has to be pleasant and put up with a bit of noise.
He has slept all night while I got up at 2am, 5am and then finally 7am with the puppies as I’m paranoid about them making noise and waking him up.
He surfaced at 10am and had a shower, left the last clean towel on the floor in dusty wood shavings from the joiner then huffed that his towel was dirty. He huffed that the kitchen floor was muddy when he came downstairs, because I can’t bring washing in and take my shoes off simultaneously. He shouted at the puppies for being noisy, which made me furious and just wound them up and made them noisier. He then took the dog out for a walk in a huff, so I had an hour of peace. Then he came back and huffed because the dog mildly protested about going in her crate (to stop further mud in the house while she dried) so he just opened the door, told her to do whatever she likes, and stormed off upstairs.
He’s now in bed, which I suppose is better than him being downstairs grumping about.
Ideally I’d like him to either stay upstairs or go out, then I can just concentrate on doing my own jobs and not worry that the noise and the mess is upsetting his delicate constitution.
I should add that he’s not normally stroppy at all and this is very unusual behaviour for him, however we’ve never tried living in quite this level of chaos together before. I’ve renovated a house while living in it before I met him, so I knew it was going to be bad and accepted it. The puppies are an added complication, but again, I’ve done it before and understand that winter puppies are hard work as they can’t just play outside in bad weather, and they are noisy and messy.
I also worry that this doesn’t bode well for parenting twins, they’re also noisy, messy and chaotic and he doesn’t seem to be coping with this practice run at all.