A Change of Plans - a Follow Up

If you read the article A Change Of Plans that I wrote last Friday, then you may remember that I had a phone call on Thursday evening to say that my fiancee's daughter, husband, baby and two dogs had been booted out of the home that they were sharing with her Dad, and ended up staying with us.

We only have two bedrooms, and the second of these was almost full of our things, including most of the possessions that I had shipped from Florida when I moved back to the UK last summer. We have only been in this house for four months, and since we are renting, there is a limited amount of modification that we can do, however we needed to make space for my future daughter-in-law and family to sleep and put their things.

So, the first thing on Saturday morning, I went with her husband to buy some boards so that we could floor the loft. We had planned to do this soon, however with our wedding coming up in only five weeks, we had decided to put this off until afterwards, but obviously we couldn't have the three of them sleeping on the floor in the living room for months could we!

Most of the day on Saturday was spent up in the roof laying a floor, which was a real mess, since my knees aren't too good in the first place, and it was really dirty up there. The house was built in the 1950's, and although the roof appears to be sound, the limited insulation that there was has mostly disintegrated, and there was a lot of trash left behind by previous tenants. This included empty stereo boxes, old television aerials, and bags of rubbish, so these had to be removed before we could begin.

The floor went up fairly easily, and since the boards that you can buy are "tongue and grooved" along the sides, they fit together fairly well. The big problem was that the boards that you can buy these days are in Metric sizes, but older houses such as this were built to Imperial measurements. This meant that the joists that the floor rests on have a gap that does not correspond to the length of the boards. I had a choice of either cutting each board and losing up to 1/3 of the length, which would have been time consuming and more costly, or just laying them and being careful where I walked (or crawled), since if you stepped on the end of a board that was not resting on a joist, you could potentially break the board and go through the ceiling below, or at least cause the board to lift up in the air. Since we are only using the loft for storage, and were also in a hurry to clear the spare bedroom, I decided to take the cheap and dirty option, and ended up flooring about 2/3 of the loft.

Meantime my fiancee and her daughter had taken the baby with them to the grocery store. They returned to find us putting the trash that we had brought down into the garbage bins, and of course asked how we were getting on and if we had been able to put anything up into the attic yet. They were rather surprised when I said we had only just finished laying the floor, but we worked at it for hours without a break, and it was hard work.

My fiancee and I then set to and started work on the bedroom. We sorted out a lot of smaller boxes and packages, putting quite a lot aside that she didn't like and that I didn't like as much as when I brought it, which was sad really, since this included a lot of items that I had brought back to England from Central America on my travels twenty years ago, including paintings, pottery, wood carvings and other souvenirs. These had then been shipped to the USA when I moved over there, and now back to England again, and now it was time to get rid of them. But every once in a while, the time comes to clear out the clutter that accumulates over the years, and this was one of those times.

We then managed to get about half of the boxes up into the loft, by which time my knees were cripplingly painful, and my back was starting to hurt. With rafters blocking your path from one part of the loft to another, and with the roof being mostly too low to be able to stand up, much of the work up there had to be done on my knees, and in several places I had to bend low to get under wooden beams, and after a few hours of this, the pain gets to you - not to mention the dirt and cobwebs.

Having relocated about half of the bedroom contents, my fiancee and I went out to get some more plastic containers so that we could repack some of my things that had been shipped in larger boxes that were too big and too heavy to go up into the loft. I was horrified at the price of the plastic containers as compared to the USA. We ended up paying more for a smaller container than we would have paid at Walmart or Target for one that was twice the size.

On getting home, we had to sort out what we had left and repack it. This was quite sentimental, as it included all the things that I had grown up with in my parents house, and some things that had belonged to my Grandmother too. There was old chinaware, crystal, silverware, photographs, and other assorted things including my Mom's jewelry box. All of this had to be repackaged, and then the remainder of the items lifted up to the loft.

Fortunately my future son-in-law went up there this time and I just had to pass the boxes up to him. I don't think that I could have gone down on my knees another time!

That was a lot of hard work, but the good thing is that it's a chore that now doesn't have to be done and we can cross it off the list.

Meantime my fiancee's daughter had cooked a spaghetti bolognese, and with us all being tired and hungry, this went down a real treat.

Well this epic has just covered Saturday! Once I get writing, sometimes I can get really detailed and verbose, so rather than make this too long, I will let you go and leave Sunday's activities for another time.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your comments.