From house to home, Part 4 – guest post by Rachel

 

Did I mention that PB was selling his house? This was a large four-bedroomed section of a Georgian house which has been inhabited by himself, two of his delightful sons, and occasional tenants. Those of you familiar with Georgian architecture will immediately think “large, beautifully-proportioned rooms”. Those of you who know a particular type of man will think “infinite junk store”.

His house sale was trapped between lawyers, but in the interim one of his sons (tall, good-looking and clean) came to stay with us for a few days. PB immediately thrust him into work, moving interesting and important items from his house to mine (there seems to have been a magic portal at some point on the road where interesting and important items transformed into something quite different).

You may wonder why I was so emphatic about son’s cleanliness. As I mentioned before, the new house has one avocado bathroom. Which contains the single (avocado, obviously) loo that had to service three adults and a teenager. And no shower. So the clean and good-looking son had to maintain his status with frequent baths. I would arrive home to a pleasant fragrance, a waft of steam and a sense of tightly-crossed legs.

The requirement for a second loo increased its importance. You will remember the space under the stairs. Well, a hole was put through its wall. And a new sewer was dug. This is extremely exciting. I am ashamed to admit that it had not occurred to me that a new loo meant a new sewer and another inspection pit and all these other things that take a ridiculous amount of time and all you get out of it is an apparently empty flowerbed. Here is another picture of that space. There is a pipe! A pipe! Coming through the wall! Ready for a loo to be fitted.

The thick line on the wall on the right is a massive slab of insulation. The pipes are going to run along the top of it. There is also insulation on the left-hand side, underneath the plaster, but not so much, because it’s not semi subterranean.

You can see the full glory of the insulation in this photo. It’s not just insulation. It’s also stairs. Real stairs that you can stand on. And a newly built wooden floor. Those reclaimed planks have been reused (one of them – I’m not saying which one – is in fact a piece of skirting board. It’s OK. It’s on a solid concrete floor). The stairtreads themselves were taken from the old staircase cum ladder. You will also recognise that familiar orange wire of an extension lead running up the wall. Yes, we haven’t quite got as far as lighting.

As proof that gods do play dice (or if they don’t, they have an exquisite sense of retribution), his moving date was the day before the party (it should not have been, but it was). A day on which he was also fixing someone’s boiler and my daughter had a day off school. I was not prepared to sacrifice the planned day with my daughter cooking party food and clearing boxes out of the sitting-room to pack boxes in his house while he repaired boilers.

To do the man credit, he was sitting up the night before, installing stuff in the space below the stairs. A space I now feel that we can honour with the name “loo”. Look. It has vital porcelain equipment. It has a radiator. It even has a roll of loo paper. The more acute among you, gentle readers, will have spotted that to take this photograph, I must have been standing outside the loo. Yes. It doesn’t actually have a front wall. Or a door. There is of course a door between you and the rest of the house (the one with the cat hole in it), but I did feel that guests at the house-warming might require a little more privacy than that. And possibly (given that the party was going to be an evening event) a light. I knew that we could illuminate the loo tastefully with candles in jars, but the stairs would be rather more difficult. Torches handed out at the door perhaps? One of those stick on LED things? Hanging lanterns? We would cope. Somehow.

While he went off to pack up his house and mend a boiler, I started clearing the sitting room. It is really amazing about the transformative powers of cardboard boxes. You put in a standard quantity of delightful treasured items. You take out, a proportion of total rubbish that you cannot understand why you didn’t throw away years ago; a proportion of useful items that look a bit tatty and a proportion of treasured objects that have been irretrievably damaged and must be thrown away. If you’re very fortunate, there will be one item in each box that you are very very pleased to see again and hurriedly find a space for. The only exception to this rule is boxes of books. It’s like coffee. The amount of books that come out of a box bears no relation to the amount that went in and is in inverse proportion to the shelf space available.

I also got the house ready for the party. Here is a beautiful piece of cardboard that I have cut to fill up the hole in the floor where the hall tiles have been removed and not yet replaced.

While my daughter and I tested the quality of our new Italian oven (remember the oven) and beat up dips and taste-tested cheesy biscuits, PB packed the last remnants of his house up, and discovered all the items that his sons had left idly in the hall, the back bedroom, the front bedroom, the sitting room, the hall and the cellar. He arrived back, discarded his loaded van (so abruptly that his son’s bike was left on the roofrack for three days) then converted himself into SuperBuilder. This involves a costume consisting of a pair of sturdy trousers with knee-pads and multiple pockets and a paint-spattered shirt. SuperBuilder may be seen swinging around on lengths of dangling flex, aiming drilldrivers at escaping screws. He works without food with the aid of a plasterer’s lamp and an infinite supply of extension cables and power tools.

He sawed, he drilled, he hammered, he built. And lo, just before the party, we had a loo that you would be proud (or, at least, willing) to use.

There is a door. It may be rather narrower than our initial plan, but that was merely due to the washbasin being slightly more extravagant than our original ideas. There is a wall. There is a door handle. There is even a lock. And if that was not adequate, observe the fabulous light quality in the stairwell. It is coming from an actual light. With a shade. Carefully chosen (smother your laughter please) to co-ordinate with the tall rectangular shape of the space.

We have lift off. We have house-warming. We have perfectionist builder being concerned about the quality of his floor joists due to the number of people standing on them. (They did nobly.) And just to give you a full flavour of the party, I will give you a close-up of the door. The careful writing that notifies the casual visitor to its function (comments that it says “Zoo” will be treated with the contempt they deserve). This was created with quick-drying nail polish after PB was concerned about the clothes of visitors brushing against anything less durable. Note the subtle, distressed finish; a texture created from the ripping off of plywood and fake wood panels from the original pantry door. I believe that it gives off a sophisticated design ambience of a little French estaminet. I’d better believe this. I think we will be living like this for some time to come.