5 hours ago
6
My wife is out when Mark the builder is scheduled to come by to see what needs doing, so I have to show him myself. This, I know, will amount to a humiliating private tour of all the home repairs I have either left undone, or tried to do and made worse. It’s been two years since I last did this, so the tour will be extensive. Just before 11am the bell rings. It is a cold morning, but Mark, as usual, is wearing shorts. We start in the back garden.
“Here is where I tried to cut back the ivy and install two trellis sections,” I say, “but instead I pulled half the garden wall down.”
“You just need a bit of brickwork doing,” Mark says. “No problem.”
“Yeah, it’s just a wall,” I say. “I mean, it only has to hold itself up.”
Mark says nothing, leaving me time to consider quite how stupid this last remark was.
“Anyway,” I say, pointing up. “Then there’s this thing.”
I attempt to explain the dire state of the dilapidated construction before us, without resorting to the word pergola, which I don’t like saying out loud.
“It was bolted to a board that was already bolted to the wall,” I say. “But not, I should stress, by me.”
“And that first board is rotten, and it’s come away,” Mark says.
“Exactly,” I say. “So the whole, um, thing, is just propped up with a fence post that was more or less the right size. That was me.”
“No problem,” he says. “It’s a two-man job, unfortunately, but only a couple of hours.”
I show him a few other outdoor issues, and then we move inside and upstairs to the attic bedroom and the cracked, drooping ceiling beneath the recently repaired roof.
“I’m very worried about what’s behind there,” I say.
“Why?” says Mark, prodding the loose plaster with his finger.
“Because I went through a phase of watching a lot of YouTube videos about bad roofs,” I say.
“OK,” he says. I explain that while the outside of the roof is fixed, the underside remains unexplored.
“I fear the worst,” I say. “Poorly installed insulation, no vapour barrier, mould already forming. The whole ceiling might have to come down.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Mark says. “I’ll come back later in the week, and we’ll cut a hole in it and see what’s going on.”
“That would be great,” I say, with all the enthusiasm of someone having a root canal appointment confirmed.
“Did Mark come?” my wife says when she gets back in the afternoon.
“Oh yes,” I say.
What did he say about the ceiling?” she asks.
“He said it was no problem,” I say. “But he always says that.”
My wife is also out on the day Mark returns with a his cordless electric saw. I carry a step ladder up to the top floor and watch as he slices a square hole into the plaster, revealing an expanse of insulation. He makes another hole to cut back as far as a joist, but there isn’t one.
“They forgot joists?” I say.
“There are joists, but they’re behind here,” he says, tapping the insulation. “This is fixed to the joists.”
“And that’s bad,” I say.
“No, it’s good,” he says. “It just means you’ve got a double layer of insulation.”
“Wait,” I say. “It’s good?”
“You can just screw the new boards into this,” he says, “and then skim over it. To be honest, it’s nothing – two days’ work.”
At this point my wife arrives. She proves more capable than I am when it comes to digesting good news.
“Marvellous,” she says. “When can you start?”
“End of next week,” says Mark. “In the meantime, I’ll get the timber for the pergola, and bring it through so we’re ready to go.”
“That reminds me,” my wife says. “Our garden door is stuck shut.” In truth this is such a stupid problem that I’d been too embarrassed to mention it.
“Stuck shut?” says Mark.
“I thought it was just swollen from the rain,” I say. “But now I think it’s the latch.”
“We’ve been dragging the wheelie bins through the house for a month,” my wife says.
“It’s a mystery,” I say. “I’ve tried absolutely everything.”
“I can have a look now,” Mark says.
I follow him back down to the garden, hoping that for once he encounters a problem not easily solved.
