I thought we got to Narnia through the back of a wardrobe?
Under floor gardening
And he was never seen again
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Going Underground
In recent weeks we have removed ivy from the outside of the house and last week pulled it down from the interior wall and ceiling. The missing part of the process was the area between the inside ivy and the outisde ivy and this was beneath the dining room floorboards. It was quite easy to remove the boards since a small area had had been removed some decades earlier to install our largely ineffective central heating system. There was a very brief discussion about which one of us would squeeze into this tiny space. It was me. It wasn't at all roomy down there for someone of over six foot but by lying on my stomach and crawling along I got to the corner of the house and was able to pull up the remaining ivy and its roots and then spray weedkiller where it had been in case any roots were in hiding. Reversing myself out of the hole was surprisingly easy since once i'd entered this rather small space I did wonder how i'd get out. Perhaps that was why i was sweating like a paedophile in a playground when i was back on the right side of the floorboards.
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
Beasts of Burden
Am I allowed to moan? Is that allowed when you’ve invited into your life the situation you find yourself in? Living in a derelict house has become quite trying. Life only seems to consist of paid work, working on destroying the house, feeling exhausted and sleeping. Apart from the whole children/grandchildren confusion you have to admire Josef Fritzl’s time management and DIY skills to build an entire apartment beneath his house.
On Tuesday the car began making a noise like a rattling bag of marbles. I asked Martin if he knew of a good garage/mechanic and he recommended a cousin of Anne’s. This is a different cousin to the builder they previously recommended. By Friday the sound coming from the car was more like it was dragging a bicycle (and its rider) behind it. I delivered it to the garage on Friday and then walked to Warwick train station and got a taxi home. I spoke to the cousin on the phone a few times during the week and he didn’t ever seem quite sure if it was a gearbox or clutch problem. He replaced both I think because he didn’t ever decide which one it was. Marianna collected it on Thursday and handed over a cheque for £1249. It now drives as if the cyclist is still hanging on to the bumper only making less noise. We could cope with being carless perfectly well if we’d known that we would be but we’d made plans requiring a car so being carless for six days was frustrating. And my lap top is increasingly temperamental. As is my mobile phone. And I never know where anything is in the house. And I wasn’t looking forward to my week away assessing a teenage rapist, a child porn downloader, an animal molester and a stalker and after working all weekend by Sunday night I was as feeling as irrationally irate as the average Daily Mail reader.
We spent the weekend finishing the demolition of the front bathroom, moving our unpacked boxes into it and the front bedroom and combining both mine and Marianna’s work spaces into the front bedroom. That may be tricky in the future since she maintains that it’s impossible to work alongside me, what with my heavy handed typing style, talking and singing to myself and listening to music on headphones at a volume that is amplified through my skull into other rooms. She’s so unreasonable.
We’ve dismantled the shower apart from one tiled wall where the plumbing was. While I was working away this week Marianna heard a sound at 2am which, after a tour of the house for an intruder, she found to be tiles falling off the shower wall. Like a self-cleaning oven ours has become a self-dismantling house. Our house certainly isn’t self-cleaning though. With all the dismantling it gets dirtier and dirtier. It wouldn’t surprise me one day to find Kim and Aggie at the door, ready to burst into action.
We then emptied the dining room, taking out one of Basil’s cabinets and putting it into the garage for storage and destroying the other and putting it into the skip and also putting his MFI 1973 drinks cabinet into the skip. Then we pulled up the carpet and the usual two layers of underlay. The more we remove the colder the house will become. My clothes had been in the dining room but they’re now split between the hallway, our bedroom and the sitting room. There’ll be lots of opportunities for dawdling pedestrians to see me semi-naked rushing around the house putting an outfit together. When the cabinet was removed we had access to the space between the two areas where ivy had come into the house. Of course, behind the wallpaper there was ivy joining those two areas together. It did appear to be dead though.
I prefer to avoid conversations with our neighbours. They’re always the same.
Them: How are you?
Me: Fine (stressed and tired and surrounded by chaos)
Them: How’s the house?
Me: Oh, getting there (but by the time it’s finished Gary Glitter’s last sexual conquest will be eighteen)
We did see Anne on Sunday afternoon and she asked about the house and the car. She was being lovely and friendly as usual and making offers of help. We mentioned that we’d visit them next weekend to show them the plans for the house and while she kept making noises about how it would all be fine a degree of rigor mortis appeared on her face. That’ll be a meeting to look forward to.
On Tuesday the car began making a noise like a rattling bag of marbles. I asked Martin if he knew of a good garage/mechanic and he recommended a cousin of Anne’s. This is a different cousin to the builder they previously recommended. By Friday the sound coming from the car was more like it was dragging a bicycle (and its rider) behind it. I delivered it to the garage on Friday and then walked to Warwick train station and got a taxi home. I spoke to the cousin on the phone a few times during the week and he didn’t ever seem quite sure if it was a gearbox or clutch problem. He replaced both I think because he didn’t ever decide which one it was. Marianna collected it on Thursday and handed over a cheque for £1249. It now drives as if the cyclist is still hanging on to the bumper only making less noise. We could cope with being carless perfectly well if we’d known that we would be but we’d made plans requiring a car so being carless for six days was frustrating. And my lap top is increasingly temperamental. As is my mobile phone. And I never know where anything is in the house. And I wasn’t looking forward to my week away assessing a teenage rapist, a child porn downloader, an animal molester and a stalker and after working all weekend by Sunday night I was as feeling as irrationally irate as the average Daily Mail reader.
We spent the weekend finishing the demolition of the front bathroom, moving our unpacked boxes into it and the front bedroom and combining both mine and Marianna’s work spaces into the front bedroom. That may be tricky in the future since she maintains that it’s impossible to work alongside me, what with my heavy handed typing style, talking and singing to myself and listening to music on headphones at a volume that is amplified through my skull into other rooms. She’s so unreasonable.
We’ve dismantled the shower apart from one tiled wall where the plumbing was. While I was working away this week Marianna heard a sound at 2am which, after a tour of the house for an intruder, she found to be tiles falling off the shower wall. Like a self-cleaning oven ours has become a self-dismantling house. Our house certainly isn’t self-cleaning though. With all the dismantling it gets dirtier and dirtier. It wouldn’t surprise me one day to find Kim and Aggie at the door, ready to burst into action.
We then emptied the dining room, taking out one of Basil’s cabinets and putting it into the garage for storage and destroying the other and putting it into the skip and also putting his MFI 1973 drinks cabinet into the skip. Then we pulled up the carpet and the usual two layers of underlay. The more we remove the colder the house will become. My clothes had been in the dining room but they’re now split between the hallway, our bedroom and the sitting room. There’ll be lots of opportunities for dawdling pedestrians to see me semi-naked rushing around the house putting an outfit together. When the cabinet was removed we had access to the space between the two areas where ivy had come into the house. Of course, behind the wallpaper there was ivy joining those two areas together. It did appear to be dead though.
I prefer to avoid conversations with our neighbours. They’re always the same.
Them: How are you?
Me: Fine (stressed and tired and surrounded by chaos)
Them: How’s the house?
Me: Oh, getting there (but by the time it’s finished Gary Glitter’s last sexual conquest will be eighteen)
We did see Anne on Sunday afternoon and she asked about the house and the car. She was being lovely and friendly as usual and making offers of help. We mentioned that we’d visit them next weekend to show them the plans for the house and while she kept making noises about how it would all be fine a degree of rigor mortis appeared on her face. That’ll be a meeting to look forward to.
Dead interior ivy
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