Her Fixer Upper by Emily Kerr

Author:Emily Kerr [Kerr, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008543020
Publisher: One More Chapter

Chapter Sixteen

The summer term accelerated towards exam season in the terrifying way it always seemed to. At work I was spending every minute of the day coaxing teenagers to revise or trying to cheer them up as the stress got to them. I was still undecided about whether I dared go for the Head of Department job, but I felt the pressure, knowing that everything I did was under scrutiny regardless. And at Oak Tree Cottage, I was feeling the pressure too. As my workload increased, so had Charlie’s, and we were struggling to stick to the renovation schedule which I’d mapped out. As the evenings grew brighter, I was grateful for the extra few hours of sunlight to put in work on the house, but it never seemed enough. However tired I was, I always tried to do something each day, chipping away at the tasks, but every time I looked at the bigger picture, I felt overwhelmed by how much there was to sort out.

A month after we’d moved in, the electrician finally came out, checked the wiring and declared the electricity ‘moderately safe’ to use. In other words, we could boil a kettle or I could use the hair dryer, but it was better not to attempt to do both at the same time, not if we didn’t want to blow a fuse and have to trek down into the cellar through the dodgy hatch underneath the stairs to do battle with the fusebox. Given the expression on her face when she’d stated this small concession, which was only given after some gentle pushing from Charlie, we’d voted not to use the power if we could possibly help it. What was another month without lights? We’d booked her in to do the full rewiring at the start of the summer holiday, judging it would be the least disruptive time as I would be around all day, while Charlie could go and work in the library.

Still, not having proper electricity was at least saving us some money. And we needed to save as much as we could because we were burning through our meagre budget at an alarming rate. We were now playing host to a succession of tradespeople who were booked to do the essential work that it was simply not safe for Charlie and me to attempt, however many YouTube tutorials I studied. The army of skilled craftspeople all seemed to have the terrible habit of sucking air through their teeth and shaking their heads in apparent despair when they examined the problem they’d been asked to solve. It didn’t exactly bolster my confidence in the house. But although they made it very clear that they thought we were completely deluded in the challenge we’d undertaken, they were very happy to take our money, even if some of them didn’t get to work with the haste they’d initially guaranteed.

I took to wearing headphones at school when I wasn’t actually teaching, so that when I was marching

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.