Ex porch

The horrible shed has finally gone.

For weeks now I have been scowling at the little lean-to shed in the back yard and ill-wishing it.

It was once a porch, in the house’s original incarnation, which was as a labourer’s cottage for a railway worker. Our street was built entirely to house the staff from the railway. The more important you were, the further along your house. The houses at the far end of the street are almost twice as big as ours, which was probably built for a humble porter or signalman.

When the railway sold them it became a guest house, presumably for tourists who were unambitious about their holiday accommodation. Next it became a staff house for a hotel to store its sous chefs and wine waiters whilst they were too drunk to be at work, and then it was bought by us. It is exactly a hundred years older than I am. 

When we added the French windows we bricked the draughty old doorway up. The inside of that doorway is now a set of useful shelves, and the porch became a shed, repository, mostly, for clutter.

Over the last few weeks we have emptied it. The strimmer has been hung on a handy hook next to Mark’s new shed. The last of the firewood has been burned, and not replaced. This is because it is springtime and we are rather hoping that the next few months will be too warm for fires. When the conservatory is out of the way the firewood will be brought from the huge stack at the farm and stored under a little roof in the yard, where we think we have probably got room for enough to last for a week. We are not sure about this part of the arrangement yet and so far my master plan is to worry about it when it gets cold again. 

The tins of useful things, like hinges and hooks and latches and handles, have been sorted and either thrown away or preserved in continuing uselessness in Mark’s shed. The garden wire was coiled and saved, the three-year-old bean seeds put in the dustbin, and the spiders dispatched to make their own way in the world.

All that remains is an enormous stack of floor tiles.

We bought these years and years ago, when they were being sold off as a bargain discount job lot. You can see the pile in the picture. They are the ones that are left. We have tiled three bathrooms and a kitchen with them. We had thought that we would tile the floor of the conservatory with them as well, but I have found some far more costly and beautiful tiles online that I am coveting, so we are going to put these on ugly boring ones on eBay instead. 

I cleared the stack of bricks from the yard and piled them in the conservatory, in readiness for their new role as a flower bed. This was dusty and horrid, and I should have had a shower afterwards. It was ages and ages ago, and my feet feel uncomfortably gritty and powdered with dust even now. Then we moved all of the big flower pots away from the doomed shed and into what will probably be almost their final resting place, beside the conservatory door.

Then Mark brought his big hammer into the yard and pounded on the wall of the shed until it collapsed into a satisfying pile of stone, and broken cinder blocks and plaster dust.

I could not be more pleased.

There is lots more that needs to be done, but it was raining so hard that we had to stop. We have got bank holiday taxis to drive tonight in any case, which is where we are now.

Even Lucy is at work. She is outside the pub opposite the taxi rank, glowering menacingly at drunks who fancy their chances of a last tipple before they pass out.

She is dispatching them all in our direction.

Hurrah.