Things started well - we are now a pro-doubles team for carpet removal. Rob slices and I roll (insert your own joke). I am considering an alternative career in house clearance. I will need to up my tea consumption though.
Anyway, nothing much of interest to report during our super-efficient work on this room, other than this - as Rob left the room to start on the next job, he told me that he'd also chucked out the scary-cat-death-mask. So I turned to look... IT'S STILL THERE ON THE WALL! Look!
He was sure he'd thrown it out! EEEEK!
So we moved on to the bathroom, where the lino tiles turned out to be glued to red plastic tiles underneath, which were in turn glued to the floor boards. Now, I don't know what they were glued to that wood with, but I suspect it was something akin to the glue they use to glue, I don't know, skyscrapers together, or building foundations to the ground, or something. It certainly wasn't anything you'd find sold by JML or Robert Dyas. It may have been sold by Woolworths (RIP), because Woolworths was brilliant and would totally have sold super-hard-core-extra-strength-permanent-sticky glue. Spiderman would have found his career short-lived had he used this stuff.
I'm pretty sure this glue would even be strong enough to mend a broken heart.
A LOT of hard work, sweat and snot (Rob's) got us to this stage:
Lovely. Except for those four last pieces. If you listen carefully you will hear them laughing at us. I can't look at them anymore, it hurts too much. If you look quickly and with a slight squint, they look a bit like the London 2012 logo. Which is appropriate, given how BLOOMING ANNOYING and POINTLESS they are.
We may come back to those four pieces later.
On a happier note, we did clear the rest of the lino from the kitchen and hallway. It turns out that what you really need for this job is a crowbar - in the absence of a crow bar, I put my best brownie guide hat on (brown and bobbly back in the good old days) and improvised with one of the pieces of metal that you have to fix carpets at doorways:
That metal strip is apparently called a 'threshold plate' which is rather lovely. It sounds like the tray of canapes you are offered as you arrive at a swanky party. Or perhaps a particularly painful piece of exercise equipment.
It turns out that the previous occupants owned a yeti, the majority of whose hair they have kindly left behind for us. This may well have contributed to Rob's snot earlier:
Apart from the allergen problems, all that lino also contained a frankly scary amount of long sharp nails. But we didn't injure ourselves once! Well done us. And I'm sure that was all thanks to me telling Rob every time I found a nail, which I'm also sure wasn't annoying at all.
So there we go - that's (hopefully) the last of the lino, and we just need to tackle the carpet on the stairs and in the smelly toilet room next. Tomorrow we are meeting the architect for him to no doubt tell us what an awesome job we've done so far (!).
you've done well so far! what a productive weekend.
ReplyDeleteI'll buy you a house warming gift from the states.