Floored

Renovation of second bedroom/nursery stage two is now underway.

The fireplace fiasco is now behind me, my scars are healing so, spurred on by my success with the fireplace, I have decided to expose and sand the floorboards.

Nothing is simple, however, and to be honest I am now worried that the new baby will arrive and have to sleep between a stepladder and a Black & Decker workbench.

The boards, once revealed, proved to be knackered - many not nailed down, some rotten and a few not even the right size. That’s fine, I thought. I’ll just go to B&Q and buy some new ones. This is when I discovered that nowhere sells new floorboards of the type that old houses have - ie planks of wood.

It was then that I remembered the architectural salvage yard I pass everyday on my way to work.

Ah, the Salvage Family…
It turns out that the salvage yard is a family. The first thing you notice when you meet Pa Salvage is the smell. No that’s not fair - the first thing you notice is his unfeasibly large head, then you notice the smell.
Ma Salvage was in the office; weirdly she had the same strange head shape - huge noggin and a bulbous forehead.
Manning (sic) the phones was little Daughter Salvage - what a catch! She too had the now familiar head shape. Imagine a dwarf who has grown to normal height but kept the same out of proportion limbs and head.

It is a big salvage yard, but the gene pool of a parking space. I bet birthdays are confusing in the salvage family.

A hillbilly	A Bearded Lady

Anyway - they didn’t have the floorboards I needed. Pa Salvage sent me to his brother’s yard in Peckham (same SE London Hillbilly feel, same smell, different location) and after some tense negotiations I got horribly overcharged for five nail encrusted floorboards, probably nicked from my upstairs neighbour.

Overall I feel a bit disappointed that I never met the Bearded Lady or the Snake Man but at least I found that incest is alive and well (ignoring genetic abnormalities) and thriving in South East London.

Written by exmonkey on March 13th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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