We’ve now hired a skip which was delivered on Thursday. I rang many Skip hire companies but the one whose Yellow Pages advert claimed that they were the cheapest in town turned out to be the cheapest in town. We’ve hired skips before when we lived in Hull and I found the entire experience to be quite distressing because other people would put things in our skip. I was tempted to sleep in it overnight just to avoid the annoyance of going to it in the morning and finding someone else’s mattress or coffee table filling it. That’s not to say that Marianna and I haven’t walked up the street once or twice carrying some item of furniture we no longer wanted and sheepishly slid into it someone else’s skip. Another curiosity is people taking things from your skip, clearly seeing value in items that we no longer did.
The man who delivered our skip was extremely amiable and cleverly reversed his truck into the drive at a tight angle between our fence and Anne’s car. He dropped the skip and then used the truck’s rear bumper to nudge it tight against the fence. “How will you get it out from there?” I asked. “Hopefully, your neighbour’s car won’t be there” he said. “And if it is?” was a question I kept to myself. We’ll cross that bridge when there’s no avoiding it.
The first thing to fill the skip was what was left of the front (porn) bedroom. We firstly removed the bed base (covered in deep shag carpet) and manoeuvred it out of the house and into the skip. Beneath it there was a gift from Basil, a condom. Since its use by date was December 2001 using it would be too much like playing Russian Roulette. We then rolled up sections of the deep shag carpet and two layers of underlay. Curiously, as it was de-porned the room began to look smaller, not bigger. The final job was to remove the mirrored ceiling. The mirrors weren’t actually on the ceiling but secured to a platform which was fixed to the ceiling. Perhaps Basil’s eyesight wasn’t up to much and he needed the mirrors to be a foot closer to him as he lay on the bed in order to get a good view. It appeared to be impenetrably constructed. With the aid of the crowbar one side was removed and brackets holding the mirrors in place were loosened and the mirrors could be slid out. The problem then was how to remove something the size of a dinner table from the ceiling. Logic suggested that it would be best to take it apart as it hung there but Basil had constructed it too well and the only clear way of removing it from the ceiling was all in one go or with a sledge hammer. I stood beneath it ready to take the weight while Marianna was on the step ladder loosening the screws that held the thing to the ceiling. When the last one was loosened the weight of it was quite a surprise (have you ever held a dinner table above your head?) but Marianna then descended the steps and we lowered it to the ground. Great fun. Then we dismantled it. The room looks strangely, horribly bare, like Samson shorn. With every task we manage to make the house look more dilapidated. It’s like an Airfix kit in reverse. We bought it in one piece and we’re slowly taking it apart.
Next we’ll put all of our unpacked boxes in there so we can gut another room.
Our house is no longer noteworthy for being the ugliest house on the street. It’s now the ugly house with the pink skip containing a bed base covered in deep shag pile carpet on the driveway. I've noticed people double-take as they walk by.
The man who delivered our skip was extremely amiable and cleverly reversed his truck into the drive at a tight angle between our fence and Anne’s car. He dropped the skip and then used the truck’s rear bumper to nudge it tight against the fence. “How will you get it out from there?” I asked. “Hopefully, your neighbour’s car won’t be there” he said. “And if it is?” was a question I kept to myself. We’ll cross that bridge when there’s no avoiding it.
The first thing to fill the skip was what was left of the front (porn) bedroom. We firstly removed the bed base (covered in deep shag carpet) and manoeuvred it out of the house and into the skip. Beneath it there was a gift from Basil, a condom. Since its use by date was December 2001 using it would be too much like playing Russian Roulette. We then rolled up sections of the deep shag carpet and two layers of underlay. Curiously, as it was de-porned the room began to look smaller, not bigger. The final job was to remove the mirrored ceiling. The mirrors weren’t actually on the ceiling but secured to a platform which was fixed to the ceiling. Perhaps Basil’s eyesight wasn’t up to much and he needed the mirrors to be a foot closer to him as he lay on the bed in order to get a good view. It appeared to be impenetrably constructed. With the aid of the crowbar one side was removed and brackets holding the mirrors in place were loosened and the mirrors could be slid out. The problem then was how to remove something the size of a dinner table from the ceiling. Logic suggested that it would be best to take it apart as it hung there but Basil had constructed it too well and the only clear way of removing it from the ceiling was all in one go or with a sledge hammer. I stood beneath it ready to take the weight while Marianna was on the step ladder loosening the screws that held the thing to the ceiling. When the last one was loosened the weight of it was quite a surprise (have you ever held a dinner table above your head?) but Marianna then descended the steps and we lowered it to the ground. Great fun. Then we dismantled it. The room looks strangely, horribly bare, like Samson shorn. With every task we manage to make the house look more dilapidated. It’s like an Airfix kit in reverse. We bought it in one piece and we’re slowly taking it apart.
Next we’ll put all of our unpacked boxes in there so we can gut another room.
Our house is no longer noteworthy for being the ugliest house on the street. It’s now the ugly house with the pink skip containing a bed base covered in deep shag pile carpet on the driveway. I've noticed people double-take as they walk by.
Tragically, this was the only time we had this view.
Russian Roulette
"Just hold it up there while i find the camera", said Marianna. Not the first time that phrase had been uttered in Basil's bedroom.
