… the bedroom is empty of everything apart from a set of steps and the tools that I need to lay the flooring.
Everything that I don’t need for the foreseeable future is now downstairs on the ground floor, as are all of the plasterboard offcuts. The things that I don’t need right now but which I’ll be requiring in early course are now stacked up on the stairs so I’m bound to trip up over them and break my neck before I’m much older.
That left three sheets of plasterboard and that was something that I was not looking forward too. They were too big to go down the stairs, my idea of a trapdoor didn’t work, and there was a scaffolding outside the window that I would have to dismantle.
One sheet was easy to deal with. This was the waterproof plasterboard for the shower room. I needed two full-lenght strips to finish off in there so by the time I’d cut them off, that left me with a full-length strip about 35cms wide and I could pass that down the stairs with no difficulty.
The second sheet was one of those that I bought years ago, one with the 40mm of insulation backing. That however was cracked across its width roughly halfway down so I reckoned that I may as well complete the damage. The tow halves of that went down the stairs with some degree of difficulty, but much less difficulty than dismantling the scaffolding.
This left just one sheet. And I thought to myself “sod this for a game of soldiers. I’m not dismantling the scaffolding for this” and I cut that in half too.
That resolved all of the issues at a stroke (of the plasterboard knife).
This gave me just enough time to sweep out the bedroom prior to lunch. And it does look nice in there.
After lunch I went round to Cecile’s. She and her mum are leaving tomorrow and she needed help to load up her car and to do a few other things too. It gave me an opportunity to rescue the floorboards that I had left there when I needed to unload Caliburn in a hurry a couple of years ago.
On the way back, I went to see Simon. He has a machine for fitting floorboards and he had offered to lend it to me. So I went to pick it up. It’s similar to a stapler, with an automatic magazine for the nails. You have to hit the piston with a heavy mallet to get it to work, and if you have the machine in the correct place, it punches lost-head 3-inch nails right through.
I forget how many times I’ve clouted myself with a hammer fitting floorboards, and if this maching works as well as it looks, I’ll have this floor done in no time.
