My humiliating private tour with the builder

My wife is out when Mark the builder is due to call, so I have to show him the house myself. I know this will be a humiliating private tour of all the repairs I have left undone or made worse; it has been two years since the last inspection. Mark arrives just before 11am on a cold morning, wearing shorts, and we start in the back garden.

I point out where I tried to cut back the ivy and install two trellis sections and ended up pulling half the garden wall down. Mark says it just needs a bit of brickwork. I try to explain the dilapidated construction bolted to a rotten board — the thing I am too embarrassed to call a pergola — which I had propped up with a fence post.

He says it will be a two-man job but only a couple of hours. We move inside to the attic bedroom beneath the recently repaired roof, where the ceiling is cracked and drooping.

builder, home repairs, garden wall, trellis, ivy, pergola, brickwork, fence post, roof repair, ceiling crack