Floored

Our living room floor was a mess when we moved in. It’s a project that’s been waiting its time behind all the others – the leaky roof, the flaky render, the bowed studding, the drunken sailor of a fenceline, the complete lack of flues and chimney pots in the chimneys and the windows that were so rotted we could squeeze water out of the woodwork. This year, it’s the most urgent job, and it is close to being finished.

The carpenter running the job is a man in love with wood and everything that can be done with wood. He’s serious, practical, pointing out what can and what should be done and listening to what we want. The floorboards that were there originally were oak, ripped up, cracked, stained, cut across in stupid places and replaced with cheap painted pine where they’d been badly damaged by some previous owner, and we thought it was right to have oak there again.

Harry and his partner have taken up the floorboards, removed the old joists (basically, tree branches with a flattened edge cut on them), dug out the soil underneath, put in a damp-proof membrane and a wooden ‘trestle’ structure and nailed a solid deck on the trestle. Then he went off for a few days to prepare the boards themselves.

Our lovely neighbours dropped in to say hi and were politely unimpressed by the new floor. It wasn’t until he returned on Monday and spotted the new boards being stacked in the room, ready to go on top of the basic deck, that he realised that the deck was just the underfloor – there’d be new boards on top of that, replacing what had been there before.

The doors have been open all day today and yesterday, and the house was freezing – the pond has a thick layer of ice on it and the cats’ outside water-bowl is frozen solid. The cold has got into the walls and floor and iron radiators and the heating struggles to bring the house up to temperature. The woodshed proved its worth – we had the dining room stove running within minutes of Harry and Ethan packing up and leaving, and we thawed out within an hour. Max settled himself in front of the fire and soaked himself in warmth.

They’ve worked hard all day, with a lot of sawing, planing, fitting into place and nailing and they left it all finished at half five. All the boards are down, and they look incredible. We’ve been shuffling around in there in socks, tracing grain lines and imagining what it will look like when the boards are sanded down and oiled.

The walls need to be repainted, but – we have Floorboards.