We haven’t started any activities with the children as yet. We were hoping to have started the construction of our new kitchen by now and therefore didn’t want children on the work site. The story goes like this: We received a quote from the contractor who built the existing structures on the site where we want to build and is very trustworthy. With this quote, we applied for the grant from the Australian embassy. We received the money to construct, but the contractor had taken on a new job and wouldn’t be available until March.

Thinking that we would love to get the construction under way we sorted out another contractor to begin the job in February. I ‘assumed’ (my bad) that our architect who is drawing up the plans for the project had advised the new contractor of the amount of the original quote, or the available money that we had to spend. This not being the case, this new contractor returned to us with a quote which was almost four times that amount which we have to build the kitchen. He also didn’t want to budge on that price.

So now we have decided to have a meeting with the original contractor to discuss the logistics of him starting the build in March. Another factor which has to be included into this equation is the fact that in the three months since we received the grant, there has been an election, a change of government, and an overhaul of the economy, thus prices of pretty much everything has risen steeply.

What this means is that the original quote is now extinct and we will have to accept that the renewed quote is going to be much more expensive. Therefore, we will have to allocate some of the money that was to be used for kitchen equipment to the construction. We will only buy the kitchen equipment necessary for us to function in the beginning, (oven, fridge, food processor) and look for other means to acquire the rest of the equipment to fully equip the kitchen in the future.

All of this is new ground and valuable learning for us. Onward we march…