Preparing the front room for the builders’ return with the new floorboards is a bigger task than we’d bargained for. The cement base for the tiled plinth around the fireplace seemed to have been built in several small chunks, and the old floorboards ran through the middle of one side, like an oak sandwich with cement instead of bread above and below the boards.
On Monday we shuttered the missing corner and built it up with concrete and cement. On Tuesday, we discovered that part of the shuttering came out easily, and part of it had wedged itself so tightly that it took three hours of patient work and effort to get it free. The only job after that was to knock off a bulge of old cement to give space for the new boards to go under the edge of the tiles. Ten gentle taps and the kind of catastrophic collapsing sound you hear on Tom and Jerry cartoons, and a slab of cement the size of a large turkey fell off the bottom of the tiles and into the floorspace below. We’d found the other missing corner, apparently. One bucket of concrete and a lot of ingenious work later, and we’d filled the large gap it had left behind and blocked it in to make a sharp edge.
Today we thought we were on the last leg. We repaired the broken plaster and filled in all the cracks in the plaster that had opened up since we last painted. The room looks like a group of toddlers have been throwing white splodge at it but we are ready to paint the walls when we know what colour we want. The room is going to look great. Better yet, we’ve blocked up the holes outside that were letting mice get in and live under the floorboards and in the walls, and the room feels warmer. The draughts running under the floorboards and up through the gaps have gone.
The very last stage will be to set up the nails on the walls where we always hang our Christmas decorations. The walls are thin render over wattle and daub, and the nails get looser every year, threatening to drop boughs of holly on our noddles. With the Christmas decs secure, fresh paint, no draughts and good floorboards, it’ll be a different house. I hope I’ll still love it as much as before.
Julia Chalkley 
Julia, have you considered your own You Tube channel? This would be fascinating to watch. Hope you are near the end of it now, though.
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Every time we think we’re finished, we find another bodge to repair. There’s still a gap of about 2cm under the repaired corner, and the YouTube of that would be a lot of swearing and rapped knuckles as we try to squeeze cement through the gap. Though yeah, that might be more interesting than the clean and competent people who just never make a mistake in their DIY.
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