WHEN THE WHEELBARROW, two handsaws and the chisel finally vanished from the living room, I was sure that at long last I was winning my battle with the builders for possession of my cottage. Once I got rid of the pickax in the kitchen, it was mine, all mine.

Or so I thought. I thought wrong. Keeping crews of stonemasons, carpenters, plasterers, painters and plumbers concentrating on the job at hand bears an uncanny resemblance to shoveling fleas with a pitchfork. It's even worse when the fleas have no concept of time as we know it.

It took the Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu's workmen 20 years to build his pyramid in what now are the sandy suburbs of Cairo. I think I've hired some of their descendants to construct an extension to my cottage in leafy Northamptonshire. When it comes to builders, not a lot has changed in 4,700 years.

My wife Elizabeth and I bought Chard Cottage nine years ago, but it was not until just before last Christmas that the idea popped into our heads to quit London and move to the countryside and Yuletide fires with our hearts all aglow, sheep going "baaaa," the occasional buzzard circling overhead, and other such romantic claptrap.

(Bucolia does, however, take on a special charm when one discovers that traffic in London, at less than 9 mph, is even more snail-paced than it was in 1899 when horse doo-doo was a major hazard, and that one's landlord, latest in a long line of accomplished highway bandits, has just hiked the rent by 54 percent.)

The problem was that we had fully furnished both the apartment in London and the cottage in a small village 70 miles distant - and merging the two would take on the aspect of cramming 10 pounds of cow poo into a 5-pound cow poo jar. Some alternative thinking was required.

It was Elizabeth, an incurable romantic, who hit upon the idea of slapping a two-story extension onto the cottage to create a "des res in the country" with 40 percent more space, much of which appears to be taken up by a couple of miles of built-in closets ("I'll worry about those, so never you mind," she tells/warns me).

So call in a builder, get an estimate, arrange for a few shekels to pay for it, work out a time estimate and summon the workers to get on with the work. So what could be simpler?

Well, building the first atomic bomb springs to mind, as does landing a man on the moon, developing a theory to explain the supermassive black hole in the middle of our Milky Way, and teaching a Florida voter how to mark a ballot without help from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Our builder - we'll call him "Roy," because that's his name - estimated the project would take about three months and that we should be able to move in lock, stock and cat litter by mid-October. For accuracy, that ranks up there with the prediction that Elvis would return for Halloween playing a ukulele on a camel's back.

One day in mid-October, with the true spirit of naivete still rampant in my veins, I drove to the cottage for a last-minute check before summoning the movers to transport us into rustic splendor in time to get the jack-o-lanterns installed on the stone fence and to start fattening the turkey for Thanksgiving.

Then I opened the door to Chard Cottage and tripped over the pickax in the kitchen. My hand reached for the light switch and came away drenched in bright yellow paint. I glanced past the wheelbarrow and sawhorse on the living room's dirt floor to the new French doors that weren't there.

In the back garden was a cement mixer where Elizabeth's fuchsias, pansies and lavender plant once ruled, and my mind flashed back to something she told me a few months ago, when we were considering the agonies of moving home:

"There's a study not too long ago, you know," said Elizabeth, "which reckons that moving house is the second-most stressful experience you can go through in life." And what, my sweet, was first? "Bereavement," she replied.

As I examined the bomb site that looked like it would be home for the rest of my life, it suddenly occurred to me that we might be about to simultaneously experience both Nos. 1 and 2 in the major leagues of stress - shifting to new digs and attending Roy's funeral, a dead cert if Elizabeth ever clamped eyeballs on that mixer nestling amid her fuchsias.

What I had discovered, of course, is that builder time on Earth is actually measured on the length of the day on the sixth planet of the star Betelgeuse. It has nothing to do with the approximately one hour that my wife would give our builder to get rid of the mixer before she shoved it somewhere where the sun doesn't shine.

Meanwhile, I left a list of things yet to be done, ranging from getting the French doors installed, something resembling a floor installed in the expanded living room and holes repaired around various electrical sockets, to getting rid of the wretched pickax. Oh, and see to the cold water tap on the kitchen faucet - it seems to have a plugged bladder.

Today, I am in my fifth hour in a hardback kitchen chair, alternately pounding away on this and playing Solitaire on the computer while the carpet man does carpeting things, the decorator chips away at kitchen tiles and the carpenter is on his fourth set of fuses as he installs an outdoor light out back.

What I have learned from all this is that dealing with carpenters and painters and the like is a character-building experience, not unlike finding out about electricity by sticking your fingers in a lamp socket or discovering that roast porcupine smells marginally better than it tastes.

Meanwhile, the upside to all this is that we are on course to spend the first Christmas of the new Millennium in front of a roaring blaze in the fireplace, in the company of several tons of possessions stacked like a miniature Manhattan skyline, in scores of cardboard boxes.

Hope nothing catches fire, though. The cold water tap still doesn't work.

Thought for the Week: It's not wise to do card tricks for people you play poker with.

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