THE SECRET PLAN?

I’ve been trying to work out why retirement has been so traumatic for me. It may be because I’m nosy and can’t come to terms with being “out of the loop”. Or is it that I invested most of my life in my family and business and now half of my purpose for living has gone? Also my husband is attempting to retire too – a double whammy! I guess all of the above and much, much more. It has been pointed out to me that this is not just my problem. Apparently I’m causing mayhem wherever I go! Good.

My husband’s retirement plan is to build stuff. This seems a bit odd considering he was a builder in his former life and hated it. But he assures me that this is different. He will be doing it because he wants to not because he has to.

We have had plans drawn up to remove internal walls and the ceiling in the kitchen to create a huge vaulted kitchen, dining, living area with suspended walkway through to a new 1st floor bedroom suite. As if that’s not enough we have plans to build a swimming pool. And that’s just the beginning!

Is his secret plan to keep me occupied too because, unlike wifeinthenorth who has sensibly moved out whilst the builders demolish her house, we will live on site? Or is he trying to recapture our youth when we did this for fun? Every time we renovated a house we swore that we would never do that again, but here we are, raring to go and looking forward to disrupting our comfortable, boring life. Isn’t one definition of madness that you keep repeating the same mistakes but expect a different outcome?

I did initially think, ah! this is a good way to spend the inheritance money until I realised that it will increase the value of the house and they will still benefit. The plan to waste money on travel is not working too well either because the wretched airlines will only charged me £1 to travel around the world. Luckily the government is more co-operative and is obsessed with depriving heirs of their rights by taxing everything out of sight.