Floor show

Dearie me, I thought that I had a dispiriting mess yesterday.

Compared to today, yesterday’s mess turns out to be nothing more than a neglected corner of the Ideal Homes Exhibition.

Mark took the rest of the cupboards down before he went to work this morning.

I spent almost all of yesterday taking cupboards down. Mark took down the far more inaccessible cupboards, the ones at the top, in about ten minutes. Admittedly he had an electric screwdriver and presumably remembered where he had put the screws in the first place, but nevertheless it was a moment of gloomy inadequacy.

I think it helps to be a foot taller as well.

He left the cupboards on the floor for me to dismantle them and stack them in my taxi, ready to go to the tip tomorrow.

I dismantled them, mostly with a hammer, and then trailed in and out through the dreadful deluge of rain to put them in the back of the taxi.

I was wet when I had finished, and the taxi had a sliding pile of grubby MDF in the back.

They were rubbish cupboards anyway. We bought them very cheaply from an internet kitchen seller who mystifyingly would not take bank payments, only cash, and the drawers and doors were slightly different colours. The shelves worked all right as long as you didn’t put anything heavy on them, and I was obliged to keep a giant Nutella jar on the bottom shelf even though we do not use it any more, because it was just the right size to hold up the shelf above.

I was not exactly sorry to see it go.

After that I turned my attention to the floor.

This was where the true horribleness started. Shifting sticky cupboards through the rain is a bit horrible, but nothing compared to scraping up disgusting sodden hardboard off the floor.

Underneath the carpet the layer of insulating hardboard was completely, greasily black. It crumbled away in my fingers, except for in the bits where Mark had thoroughly glued it down to the levelling compound underneath. In those bits, of which there were many, the glue remained, and had to be scraped off with a wallpaper scraper and a very good deal of effort. Also there were Living Things. Some were spiders, and some were wriggly, and all of them were horrible.

None of them were actual fish, I think, which is good.

Fortunately the carpet in the room was in two halves. I moved all of the furniture on to one half whilst I took up the other. Then I reversed the process.

It smelled utterly dreadful. In the places which were not sodden the mould rose up in dusty clouds. It filled my nose and throat. This left a revolting greasy film on my skin and in my mouth, and made me sneeze. I have been coughing on and off ever since. I hope this goes away quickly or I will I will become a social pariah and people will telephone the NHS when I go to the supermarket.

I scraped and swept and shovelled and peeled sodden board off. I could not move the grandfather clock, and had to cut around it. Mark said that he will move it in the morning.

In the end it was all gone, and the floor scraped, after which needed mopping. We do not have a mop any more, so I borrowed one from the Peppers, but it was the modern sort which incorporates its own bucket and has a disposable moppy bit. I could not work it out, and in any case it was filthily black before I had even swiped it across the floor, so in the end I gave up and just sloshed a bottle of bleach all over the floor, which I mopped up with a disused vest.

It turned out that it was, of course, the washing machine which was the culprit. Obviously the floor is a bit damp without any help from us, because of being ten feet underground. Even in the usual way of things our kitchen could be likened to an unexpectedly lively graveyard.

All the same, the washing machine, like a guilty puppy, was standing in a small puddle. It is not the first time that this has happened. Mark has replaced bits on the washing machine so many times that it has become the Steve Austin of the laundry world, although not, I think, worth six million dollars.

You have to have been around in the nineteen seventies to understand that reference. Young people need not trouble themselves.

Mark sighed when I told him, and said that perhaps we ought to think about getting another one. I do not want to think about that option, but he might be right.

I am encouraged to think that I do not need to worry about it leaking on the carpet any more. It can leak directly on to the floor and be sponged up.

I have attached a picture.

This was not even the worst bit.