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Building A Relationship
For Linda and Richard, cement, literally, has bound their relationship together since their first dramatic meeting - at a dog’s funeral… Ian Peacock, intrepid Home Truths reporter was first with the story...
Linda's visit to Birmingham to see friends included an unscheduled funeral for a dog. It was Richard who'd had dug the grave. "That was my first sight of him, up to his waist in the dog’s grave," recalls Linda. Their eyes locked across the hole in the ground - it was love. Within months they’d bought a derelict house together, and Linda, extended her talent as a graphic designer to become Richard’s apprentice brickie.
It was a marriage of inspiration and perspiration; their relationship strengthened as they worked on the house together room by room. Where most people had a food mixer in the kitchen, theirs held a cement mixer.
"The house is an extension of our relationship…and if we didn’t work so well together, we'd have had people in to do the work," says Linda, "It’s about nest building as well, because we’re both in our 40s and second time rounders. There’s also so this thing about one moving into the other's house, and it not quite feeling like it’s theirs as well…that can cause quite a lot of difficulties, but this way, you’re making a nest together."
Their relationship moved from strength to strength, and Richard bought Linda a welding machine for her birthday, and promoted her from apprentice to foreman.
Richard too has gone through a metamorphosis, finding himself interested in the arts, herb gardening and Cordon-Bleu cookery, even preparing a daily vegetarian dinner for an elderly fox which lives in their garden, "Builders," he claims "are essentially sensitive and caring people. There’s been a lot of bad publicity attached to uncaring builders.
What will happen when the house is finished? "It’s never going to be finished - there are things about it which are unfinishable…" says Linda.
Has sharing a project with someone close to you improved or damaged your relationship?
What was it you worked on?
Was their a defining moment when you both realised that your activities were leading to success or failure?
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