That’s how many tiles it takes to cover our roof.

I know because Arnaud and Igor have just replaced them, despite neither having done it before.

Then again, three years ago, Arnaud had not yet rebuilt our house.

Igor has been by his side for much of those three years. Together, they have worked through sun, rain, wind and, recently, the kind of heat that makes being on a roof seem slightly mad.

During the heatwave, they would climb down and drink two litres of ice-cold Coke between them.

We are told Coke is bad for us. I’m not sure I have ever seen anything look more deserved.

Arnaud called it the most beautiful moment. He lost kilos, and more than a little sleep.

I like order. I like things finished, put away and where they belong. My chairman, Mark, often tells me that chaos is normal. I have spent three years arguing with that sentence. Because rebuilding a house is chaos.

There has always been dust somewhere, scaffolding outside a window, tools where things should be, another room unfinished and another weekend given over to the house.

I have moved things into boxes only to move the boxes somewhere else. I have cleaned rooms knowing they would be dirty again by evening. I have looked at scaffolding outside the window and wanted, more than anything, for it simply to be gone.

I wanted to live in the finished house while Arnaud was still building it. That is the part I find hardest to admit. Because while I was longing for order, he was making something.

For three years, I thought the chaos was what stood between us and the finished house. Now I can see it was how the house got made.

The scaffolding is finally coming down and the house looks transformed.

For the first time, I find myself looking properly at the roof. At the tiles, how they sit and the edges where they had to be cut. At something I have lived beneath my whole life without once wondering how it got there.

No one looking at it will see the two litres of Coke. They won’t see the kilos Arnaud lost, the sleep he missed or Igor beside him through three years of figuring out things neither of them had done before. They will just see a roof.

And that is what finished things do. They hide the chaos that made them.

I spend much of my life trying to create order. At work, I build systems, clarify things, put things in their place. I have always thought that was how you make things better.

Mark is right. Chaos is normal. Not because we should surrender to it. Because sometimes chaos is evidence that something is being made.

I have looked at roofs my whole life. I don’t think I ever really saw one.

Sometimes it takes someone you love doing the work to finally look up.