The stress of moving

At the precise moment that this new edition sees the light of day (both in print and online) I will have been living in our new home for exactly one week. I might be sitting on our new sofa, or preparing a meal in our brand-new kitchen. 

Our new sofa will be standing on a beautiful new poured floor. A few days before the floor was installed we put down mouse traps just to be on the safe side, and on the evening beforehand I sprayed insecticide into every nook and cranny – I’d prefer not to have any flies, mosquitoes or ants immortalised in my otherwise smooth floor! Actually, it was the contractor who gave us these tips. To lend extra weight to his advice, he told us about a project at a bakery company where, despite their traditional light-footedness, a couple of mice became stuck in a newly installed acrylic floor. “A whole new type of anti-slip protection,” he chuckled. Not very hygienic, I thought. And those poor mice…

In actual fact, our new house isn’t new at all; it was built in the early 1970s and the same family had lived there ever since until we bought it. The children had all left home in the meantime and both the parents are now in a nursing home. Not much renovation work (i.e. none!) has been done for a long time. There was an old fuse box, a brown tiled floor with more than the odd loose flagstone, and an extremely ‘authentic’ kitchen that was crumbling with age. So we spent the first few weeks ripping the whole place out before putting up new interior walls.

During a renovation project you have to decide on every single detail: firstly about the quality of the sandpaper, the paintbrushes, the rollers and the paint, then about the type of wall sockets and the style of doors, and then the wall tiles, the grouting, the wash basin and the laminate flooring. And what about the colours? But above all, how on earth will we manage to stay within our budget? 

On top of that, there is so much to coordinate and all kinds of tasks that have to be streamlined. It just takes one kink in the cable (power cut, plasterer stuck in traffic) to throw the whole schedule into chaos. Sounds familiar? 

So it has been a turbulent period for me to be working on this themed issue, but as my home life and work life seamlessly blended into one, I discovered that there are a surprising number of similarities between (re)building a house and constructing a factory. But above all I realised that this is only true at general level – because constructing a food facility involves a tremendous amount of specialist knowledge. Compared to that, renovating a house is ‘peanuts’. So I wish you lots of luck with your engineering & construction project – and, believe me, I know you need it!

Judith Witte
 
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