Crafts DIY and health blog: Day 41 and DIY crafts

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Day 41 and DIY crafts

This morning on our way to the house at 8:45, I saw a man walking through Plumstead in a smart shirt, nice trousers and boots.

“Look!” I yelled, “a respectable citizen up and dressed on a Sunday morning! It must be up-and-coming around here after all.”

“I’m sorry to break this too you my love”, said Bryony in the voice she uses to break bad news to me, “but I think that man is in fact doing the walk of shame.”

It was true, he did indeed appear to be doing the walk of shame, and, by the expression on his face, was pretty pissed off to have woken up in Plumstead.

Post-holiday I’ve found my productivity to well below par. After arriving, I plodded around the house in a sort of languid torpor, stopping every few minutes to stare desolately at missing skirting boards, holes in the wall, doorways without doors, bare plaster and the ever-growing building site where our kitchen should be. Mentally, I assigned a wildly optimistic labour effort to each of the tasks which to be completed and still managed to come up with a figure of several weeks of intensive work.

I have been putting off the job of fitting skirting boards to the lounge for some time, as I believed that mitring the boards around the bay window would be a particular pain in the arse. This reticence is out of character; my natural impulse is to throw myself headlong into such jobs and then slowly and painfully retreat, investing huge effort – and sometimes money – in repairing the bad work that I have done. Today though, I proved that it is well within my capabilities to something slowly and badly. I adopted what one might call the ‘methodically awful’ approach. Painstakingly, I measured each and every angle, bisected it, marked the wood, checked it, re-checked it, and then cut the mitre. Upon ‘offering up’ the skirting boards, I would then discover to my horror that they looked like they had been cut for a different room, put them down in the neat pile of offcuts, swear violently, and start again. After an hour or so of this, I decided to give up and cut the mitres ‘by eye’. Incomprehensibly, this produced much better results, and I am now a good three quarters of the way around the room. The bay window – thank God – is done.

Joe was in attendance at the house today to provide expert advice on all aspects of the building project. He arrived with a number of specialist tools including two sausage rolls and a ‘steak-bake’.

“I don’t know what it is about coming to your house,” said Joe, midway through his second sausage roll “but it always makes me want a Greggs.” I can only hope that this won’t continue to be the case once we have a working kitchen.

As we’d spent the previous two hours stripping paint, Joe’s arrival provided a convenient excuse for a change of task. Knowing how much Bryony loves a trip to the tip, I didn’t feel that it would be a good idea to go without her. Many hands make light work, but one must strike a balance. There is little point in a tip trip with more people than stuff to be disposed of. As Joe pointed out, this turns the journey into a very depressing sort of tourist outing. We all went, but loaded up the car with concrete, doors, an iron gate and a particularly foul-smelling old soil-stack in order to ‘get our money’s worth’.

The saga of the understairs toilet continues. We are in receipt of a quotation from a plumber to do the whole job – bar all the boxing in of the cables and gas pipes – but we can’t seem to work out whether it’s expensive or reasonable. As usual, we are tempted to undertake the work ourselves, but there are certain risks inherent in this approach. I shall illustrate one of them to you now by way of example.

This evening I discussed with Bryony where we would put the sink and toilet and how we would go about getting the ‘waste water’ out of the room and into the drain. I outlined a few of the challenges to Bryony who considered them carefully before proposing a plan. For want of a pen and paper we stood in the kitchen and acted out the roles of toilet and sink. Bryony was sink and, predictably, I was toilet. My left arm took the part of waste pipe. All seemed to be going well until Bryony put forward her plan for the route of the sink waste pipe. This, she suggested, should drop below the floorboards and connect to the outlet pipe of the ‘Saniflo’ pumping unit.

“Ah, no Bryony, I must stop you there,” I said, left hand still outstretched. “Sadly that layout would result in pressurised excrement blasting up the plughole whenever someone flushes the loo.”

“Ah, yes, I see,” said Bryony, “that’s not really ideal is it?”

“No, I don’t think it is ideal, especially if you happen to be brushing your teeth.”

So we’re back to the drawing board again. Running a pipe along the wall is the most obvious solution, but this necessitates threading it between the cables of the incoming electricity supply. I fear that the building inspector – should, heaven forbid, he ever visit – may not be too keen on this idea.