Renovations

I was going to say that it has been a very busy day off, but in fact it is still being a very busy day off. I have taken a bit of time to write to you, but Mark and Oliver are still upstairs being busy.

It is half past eight, and we haven’t even had dinner yet. We haven’t even started cooking dinner.

We haven’t even taken anything out of the freezer.

This is going to have to be my next project when the two of them have finished and I have updated you on our adventures. I think we had better have pasta because it is quick and easy. Probably just pasta. Anything else is too complicated.

We have been rebuilding Oliver’s bedroom. We have moved the built-in desk from one side of the bedroom to the other. This does not sound like very much of a challenge, but actually it has involved the most horrible kerfuffle of screws and drilling and swearing, and black mould and spider webs and sawdust everywhere.

It has been so awful that my hands are itching as if I had been trying to wipe off a dose of scabies with some poison ivy, although so many things make me itch that this is not surprising. It is probably the black mould spores.

One of his bedroom walls was completely covered in black mould, and was so damp that it was not damp, but wet.  Water was dribbling down it as if it was weeping with self-pity, which it probably was.

The damp was mostly behind one of the quilts that we had nailed there to stop the neighbours complaining about the drum kit, not that they would really. One side is a holiday house, and the other side is just not the complaining sort. In fact we have had several happily companionable drinking evenings with him at times when we are not busy and a hangover will not matter too much. I think he has plenty of these at his own house and therefore would probably not notice the drum kit.

We put the quilt in the holiday house dustbin. This is one of the advantages of holidays not being allowed at the moment, meaning that we have both an extra dustbin and a handy driveway at our disposal, every cloud etc.

I scrubbed the wall and Mark took the desk apart. Oliver ran up and down the stairs fetching useful things, and hoovering the dust up. There was a lot of dust, and we discovered that I had not managed to get rid of all of the moth cocoons after all.

When eventually we had put his bed back in its new position we all looked around with satisfaction and wondered why we had not built it like that in the first place.

Mark is now busy taking his chest of drawers apart and rebuilding it a bit smaller so that it will fit underneath the windowsill. It has got to be one drawer smaller. This does not sound like a huge problem but in fact it is not at all simple and there are a lot of sawing noises and swearing coming from upstairs.

It has all been quite remarkably successful. As you know, Lucy is coming next week and will be repossessing her bedroom, which means that Oliver will have to do lessons in his own bedroom. I have helped myself to be sanguine about this by sternly reminding myself that  there are lots of families who do not have spare rooms which can be used as classrooms, and that some children do not even have a bedroom of their own.

In fact the family that lives across the road is struggling so hard to make space for everybody to do lessons without squabbling and tripping over one another that the eldest daughter has had to move into her mother’s bedroom. We are so well off for bedroom space that we do not have anybody at all living in the loft at the moment, mostly because it is crammed from floor to ceiling with clutter, and because nobody ever goes in it it is cold.

We have added some more clutter today. I am going to have to do something about it soon.

Not this week.

This week I am going to paint Oliver’s bedroom.

I can start tomorrow.

I took a picture of the horrible mould but it was so depressing that I have decided not to use it, even though it is gone now. Have a picture of Mark and a chest of drawers jigsaw instead.