Sounds like a euphemism doesn’t it? Something dark and mysterious hinting at lengthy sessions lying on a chaise longue with a chap with one of those irritating little goatee beards and a clip board taking notes in a mittel European accent.
‘Zo, tell me vunce more, vot vas ze exact problem viz your muzzer and ze seal juggler from Bangor? And vy are you wearinnk blue zockz viz green jeans hmmmm?’
Vell, sorry well, I can’t find green socks anywhere and the crud still emerging from the loft is exactly that. Yesterday and the day before, the other half went crawling into the very eaves with rolls of insulation and a long stick while I directed the light from the 1950s Anglopoise lamp into precisely the wrong place.
This is what we found in the eaves: a huge bird’s nest, five six foot long metal curtain tracks and yards of loosely associated strings and pull cords, a roll of lovingly wrapped up hideous wallpaper, dozens of really long nails, a small metal lid with a wooden knob, my lifetime collection of lampshades, a four foot long red lacquered handle bent at both ends, a cardboard water tray for pre-pasted wallpaper, three odd pieces of carpet, four lumps of disintegrating underlay, more appalling wallpaper, a metal thing and another metal thing (one with screws, one without), a ball cock, (plumber ho!), several chunks of wood, a wasp’s nest, a floorboard and yards and yards of old unconnected electrical wire that we paid the electricians to remove when they did the rewiring two years ago.
It’s a treasure trove of crud.
So today we’re going back up there to finish the job, which involves unscrewing the floorboards we laid and fastened down to have a safe place to work from to do the rest, so that we can insulate under the floorboards. After which we’ll fasten them down and be clean and warm up in the loft, which isn’t a euphemism for mental health, it’s just a clean, insulated, boarded loft.
One unexpected joy was the point, on Saturday afternoon, at which a couple of young men in hoodies, with clipboards, knocked at the door to give us, ‘information for old people about grants for insulating the loft’ and more information about how they could take the money off us, no doubt. Wordlessly I pointed to the huge rolls of loft insulation in the hall that were just about to be carried upstairs and, wordlessly, they left.
There’s a silver lining in everything. Meanwhile, if you wish to start a lampshade museum, get in touch.
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Jane Laverick.com – good mental health and clean lofts.