Last summer I bought a flat, or rather, a maisonette: two storeys cut from a four-story 19th century terrace in Kentish Town, north London. It was nice, I thought. Or would be. All it needed was a new bathroom, replacing the cupboards in the kitchen and re-wiring - the electricity was clearly dodgy. 

In October the builders came in and took up the floors for the new wiring, and oh! What follows is a long, long tale which I have been posting on Facebook, but will add here, in bits. It will follow the progress of putting right what we discovered was so frighteningly wrong. And it will include the history of how the hosue came to be at all, never mind in the condition it was in when I found what was hidden under the floors.

Is anybody interested? 

Here's the first bit.

16^th October

I am living in the flat above mine, thanks to my upstairs neighbours who are away, and friendly. My actual flat is being torn apart by a Pole and a half. In two days they have ripped out the kitchen and bathroom and living room. Bedrooms still to go. They work too hard but they're frightened of the boss.

Meanwhile I had some other people, not Poles, and not frightened of the boss, laying turf at the back of my garden. They raked, and smoothed, and stamped, and smoothed over with sand-based loam, then rolled out the turf. They left with instructions that I should water the turf for a good 25 minutes every day for two weeks, and remove all the leaves. The turf is under some large trees and it is autumn.

So I raked away leaves very carefully, standing on old shelving to do it because standing on the grass itself is forbidden. And when it comes to grass I do as I am told. I will have to do it again tomorrow. Then I went to the outside tap where the hose is fixed. But no water came out. Now I knew that the Poles had shut off the stop-cock on the raised ground floor because they were dismantling the kitchen. But my assumption had been (false) that this outside tap ran off the entirely separate lower ground floor water system. I mean, the tap is as low down as you can get!

So, faute de mieux, I have been traipsing between a shower room on the lower ground floor and out to the garden and back to the shower room and out to the garden, with a watering can in either hand, and slowly and evenly (I profoundly hope) watered the new turf leaning out from the laid out book-shelves. This has taken about two hours and now I have stopped, fully aware that there are a) some bits I didn't get to and b) two new leaves on the grass. Where are Sabrina and Assia when you need them?

It was a pleasantly mindless thing to be doing on a darkish afternoon, while the sounds of Bartek and his drill slicing old tiles off the bathroom walls made me fear for my relationship with my new neighbours.