Yay! A Bank Holiday weekend!
Three whole days off work to relax and unwind... or 72 hours of fear, loathing and DIY.I’m lucky enough to be the current owner of a charming terraced house, on a quiet street, built lovingly from local stone by craftsmen over 100 years ago.
Some delightful period features, a dash of quirkiness and a rugged exterior means I’m quite similar in many ways.
Unfortunately, the craftspersonages who put it together seemingly didn’t own a tape measure, for every door is a different size, the ceilings slope gently (which works OK, because the floor does too) and they had clearly never heard of right-angles or straight edges.
Even their best efforts have been surpassed by a century’s worth of amateur DIY (Damage It Yourself) enthusiasts giving their all in the name of top notch corner-cutting, bodging and disfiguring.
To give you an idea of what we’re up against, we once foolishly thought it might be nice to double the number of plug sockets in the bedroom - to two. As it turned out, this necessitated rewiring the house, and ‘redecorating’ involved removing an entire wall that turned out to only be standing because it was held together by multiple layers of blown vinyl wallpaper.
I still have flashbacks that involve me sobbing uncontrollably onto a sheet of plasterboard that wouldn’t fit because it’s edges were too straight.
Next up is the hall, landing and stairs. Currently a fetching shade of ‘Despair Yellow’, early attempts to remove the woodchip have revealed further layers of woodchip, plaster on top of woodchip and damp patches from next-door’s disused chimney. Oddly, there’s also some black, tar-like sheet on some bits which I can only assume was put up in the 70s by a stoned owner to stop aliens from reading his thoughts... man.
We’ll need to rectify the different heights of skirting board, and there is another wall which I think might have been constructed using the wattle and daub technique, with a large area under another acre of woodchip that moves worryingly when you press it.
Hopefully, removing the boxwork on the landing will reveal beautiful old banisters, waiting to be restored to their former glory. Sadly, they will no longer have their stairs counterparts as these were ripped out before we moved in.
The stairwell is so high, I suspect we’ll need oxygen pumping up there when we attempt to explore it’s uppermost regions, and I’m genuinely scared of what we might find under the worn carpet.
With sockets and switches that delightful shade of yellowy-brown that only comes with decades of use (and all in ridiculously unhelpful locations), a radiator that can probably remember when England won the World Cup, and a filled-in doorway that was clearly blocked up at night, during a power cut, by a blind 5 year old, it could be a tough long weekend for me and Mrs G.
On second thoughts... is there anything good on TV?
This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 1st of May 2015, where it was retitled as "I'm still having DIY flashbacks". You can read the version published by the paper on their website here
Written and submitted a full week ahead of publication, this was my holiday filler column, meaning I wrote two on consecutive nights. Hopefully, quality control didn't suffer as a result.
It's now Sunday lunchtime, and we're still yet to do any of the DIY, although we have talked about it. That counts, right..?
(Jean Michel Jarre CD singles still being played today. Always interesting to consider that a 35 minute CD containing 6 different mixes of Oxygene 10 clocks in with a total time longer than the first few Beatles albums...)
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