SaveNovember 8^th

A Scotsman, an Irishman and a Pole come onto a building site...From three directions they came, one in a car, one on foot and one in a van - to look, shake their heads, discuss, laugh. What is that joist holding up? Oh look, those bricks below the floor are post-war...they must have been shoring up the walls from below (not very well, if you ask me!). What happens if we...But could we...? This is going to cost you, says the Irishman, the structural engineer. We turn to look at the Pole, who grins. Make him give you the best options, he says, pointing at the Scotsman (the architect). I turn the proposed layout he has brought this way and that but the rooms as they will be are becoming unimaginable, and as they were, irrecoverable. This is what they look like now, one of them anyway.

10^th November

Site meeting with the builder and Sabrina Budalica, who has come to cast an architectural eye. She has looked sceptically at the plans the other architect drew up and instantly found flaws – along the lines of ‘what cowboy done this, then?’ She is absolutely right. ‘If you put the loo in the shower room where this guy suggests, your knees will hit the wall, and if….’ And so on. The builder says to me, ‘Go with your friend. Her ideas are better.’

Then he has another idea. ‘What if we move the partition between the two bedrooms and support the floor above with an RSJ going right the way across? Then it doesn’t matter where the partition is and you can increase the width of the shower room.’ (Am I getting too technical here?). We agree, although my friend has a cavil. It will be a very long RSJ. How will you get it into the room?

Builder laughs. We are Polish. His workers laugh too but immediately look pre-emptively tired.

Then we discuss how interesting it is that when whoever it was, post-war, who put in the low brick walls to shore up the floors they simply followed the undulating surface of the earth ground beneath. No one, when the house was originally built, or subsequently, had ever thought to make that surface level. So the supporting bricks went up and down; the joists resting on them followed, and the floors on those too. No wonder the floors slope, lower at each end than in the middle - side to side and front to back. Rather like the camber of a road, except in a road there is a purpose to it: for the rain to run off. Were they expecting it to rain in the house? Erm...
Anyway, we are now going to level off the floors. Doubtless the entire building will collapse.