According to a friend who sold a successful consulting business a few years ago, the problem with employing middle-class Britons, unlike Americans, is that there’s a summit to their ambitions. Once they’ve earned enough money to trade in their BMW for a Porsche, install a new kitchen and create an attic room with a dormer window, they start taking it easy. ‘Those are the only three things they really want,’ he says.

As a freelance journalist, I’ve abandoned all hope of owning a Porsche or getting the attic done. But after living in the same house in Acton for 15 years, I’m finally remodelling the kitchen. Or rather Caroline is. When we bought the place in 2008, it had been done to quite a high standard in the style known as ‘Victoriana’, which meant William Morris wallpaper, antique-glass light shades and a small, dimly lit kitchen with a utility area facing the garden. This was the height of fashion in the late 1980s and will probably be bang-on trend again when we put the house back on the market in ten years’ time. But my efforts to persuade Caroline to wait out the fashion cycle came to nought. She’s managed to save a bit of money since going back to work and she’s decided to spend it on a new kitchen.

In six months’ time, with no end in sight, I dare say we’ll all be living down there in my shed

I loyally pretend that this was a ‘joint decision’ when talking to the children, since it will mean a huge amount of inconvenience. But in truth I wanted Caroline to spend her nest egg on paying down the mortgage. It currently stands at over half a million and our fixed-rate mortgage of 1.14 per cent ends in 2026. If the standard variable rate in three years’ time is the same as it is now, we’ll have to find more than £40,000 a year. And what if the next government puts up property taxes? Shouldn’t we be hedging against those risks?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a strong position because I’ve put everything I’ve managed to save over the past five years into my pension. In any case, Caroline said, if we can no longer afford a five-bedroom house in 2026 we’ll just have to sell it – and the new kitchen will add to its value.

I lost the argument, obviously. When I got married, an older man gave me a piece of advice: let your wife have her way when it comes to home and hearth and she’ll leave the big decisions to you. I’ve followed that rule religiously, never so much as expressing an opinion about what colour to paint the walls. And Caroline has kept her end of the bargain, letting me decide things like where to send the children to school. But the upshot is I can’t now object to the new kitchen. That is unquestionably her domain.

The Polish builders started last week and the disruption is considerable. We’re not just talking about a new oven and worktop. Caroline wants the utility area and the kitchen to switch places and the supporting wall separating the two to be demolished. That means moving the gas boiler and inserting a steel girder in the ceiling, and that in turn means taking up the floor of my son Freddie’s room, which is immediately above. At present, the conservatory is through another doorway via the utility area, but she wants to get rid of that and create one large, open space – which means replacing the sloping conservatory roof with one that’s the same height as the new kitchen. Oh, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, the chimney has got to come down too. A major schedule of works, in other words.

Needless to say, we cannot afford to live anywhere else while this is going on, so the builders have sealed off the rear of the house and created a temporary kitchen in the play room. Our only means of cooking is an air fryer and a microwave, which means no more steak dinners. It’s a bit like camping and was quite fun to begin with, but the novelty is wearing thin. The foreman has given us a completion date of late March, which seems optimistic. I can at least disappear to my shed when it gets too noisy and dusty – a privilege that is attracting more and more resentment from the other members of my family. In six months’ time, with no end in sight, I dare say we’ll all be living down there.

I’m sure Caroline is right and the house will be much nicer when the work is finished – and absent a property crash it will probably be more valuable too. But I can’t keep telling myself that Caroline leaves all the big decisions to me. As the roof is lifted off the back of our house and a team of workmen start smashing down the walls with mallets, this feels like a major undertaking.