Each month we have a 500 (approx.) word prep which we read out. This autobiographical piece was my effort for May 2015. The picture in my first post shows our house in France.
PAPERING OVER THE CRACKS
“Never mind papering over the cracks in the walls!” Geoff
said to me, “It’s the holes in the floor we need to try and disguise!”
Geoff swore, not for the first time that day. Trying to
match up different thicknesses of wood was driving him crazy.
We hadn’t been able to agree on what to do about the
floorboards in the attic. They were
solid oak. Well some of them were solid; others had holes you could put your
fist through, but I wanted to salvage the decent ones. Hadn’t we planned to preserve as much of the
original French farmhouse as possible?
“Yes, but we can’t just leave these; we’ll fall through!” He
took a hammer and banged it against a dodgy-looking plank. A piece broke away.
“But most of its ok”, I protested. “We can cut off the end and join on another
piece”.
Geoff had had enough of ‘joining on another piece’. We were running out of decent lengths of oak
board; the last 10 foot section had had to be covered in three pieces, and
those of slightly varying thicknesses. To
make matters worse, the beams were not of a consistent width, so where they
narrowed there was insufficient space to join two pieces together.
The attic had only been made to store hay and animal feed;
there had been no requirement to have a level floor in 1850. Still, like this it did have character and we
couldn’t afford a new hardwood floor anyway; it was a case of make do with
higgledy-piggledy boards or put down a new pine floor from the French
equivalent of B and Q.
I went back down the steep stairs to open some tins for
dinner. We needed time to think.
Over the Telegraph crossword (which we usually try to do
over dinner), we considered the options:
Firstly the floor had to be safe; we agreed on that! It was
looking increasingly unlikely that we could get away without spending some
money on new wood, and pine was the most practical. Perhaps we could stain the pine to a similar
colour to the oak?
The next time we were in France, having thought some more
about our position, we decided to buy some pine boards in Brico Depot. We were lucky: they had some new stock in and it was
on special offer. We looked at each of
the bundles carefully, as some we had bought previously turned out to be full
of knots and holes.
The next week we cut and drilled and screwed down several
square metres of the attic floor and at the end of our ‘holiday’ we had a
complete, safe area on which to build our bedrooms and bathroom. Each bedroom will have a mixture of pine and
oak floor and we hope that strategically-placed rugs and furniture will
minimise the impact on the eye. More of
‘carpet over the joins’ than ‘paper over the cracks’.
Hopefully no-one will notice!
