Under The Glass: On Renovating a House

 “I pity wretched Strephon blind 
To all the charms of female kind; 
Should I the queen of love refuse, 
Because she rose from stinking ooze?”
Jonathan Swift - ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’

The above quote is from a poem about a man called Strephon who is distressed when he goes into the dressing room of a woman he idolises and sees all the work that has gone into making her beautiful. He discovers, to his dismay that the woman he loves is just as human as the next person, “Repeating in his amorous fits, Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” 

Swift’s conclusion is to pity Strephon’s either/or attitude to women’s beauty, and to say that he should appreciate the work and effort that goes into, “Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.” In some ways, it’s a lesson I’ve had to learn from my house. 

When this posts, I shall be moving into that house. As I write, it’s the Sunday before. Yesterday I was cleaning up the front room, ready for carpets to go down on Tuesday and I discovered that one of the walls was damp. This was after more than five-thousand pounds of damp-proofing being done. The day before, one of the radiators in the back room started squirting water and the ceiling is hanging on out of nothing but habit. Needless to say, when I do move in, most of the downstairs will not be liveable. I only hope the radiator is fixed soon so I can get the boiler going again and have hot water.

I knew the house was old, probably turn of the century, and that it hadn’t been very well looked after. It had been empty for almost two years and before that was owned by a landlord who obviously had a habit of hiding problems rather than fixing them. A shop round the corner informed me that the owner before that was an old lady and I think I found some of her wallpaper, she was very fond of geometric shapes and lines with small flowers over the top in some pretty dingy colours.

At first I thought that all I needed to do was have the damp-proofing done and fill in a little gap in the back room floor. However, big chunks of the floor in that room simply came off. It turned out someone had put screed on it on top of vinyl floor tiles and it was just peeling off. I could simply pull parts off with my hands which were roughly the thickness and consistency of cracking an old easter egg. Where the concrete was nearer the damp parts, it was this stubborn sludge, which probably took me more than thirty hours to chip, scrape and knock off. Then I pulled the vinyl tiles up.

Upstairs, there was this creepy poem on the wall. I didn’t recognise it at first until I showed it to someone and they sung some of the Aerosmith song that was in Independence Day.

 I pulled some of that off, then saw a loose bit of anaglypta wallpaper. I didn’t much like the texture and planned to paint the wall so I tugged at it and it peeled all along the wall, all along the ceiling and back down the other wall. I did this a few more times until I was in a sea of wallpaper. 

Of course, the bits that were left (which were mainly old wallpapers going back who-know how long) were stubborn and needed twenty-odds hours of chipping and scraping each. These revealed walls that were more polyfilla than wall, weird bodge jobs and plaster dating from before this millennium. 

I followed this process in the other bedroom, the back room and the hallway. I couldn’t face doing the stairs - and nor could I reach all of them. Every room I’ve stripped has shown holes, cracks and various dodgy things. The plasterers had to wrap the rooms they’ve plastered with a gel mesh to make them plasterable.

There were tiles in the kitchen and bathroom which stopped doors from closing and were coming up. They were plastic and glued onto white porcelain tiles that had been there before. The wet from the dampness had got into the glue and they were pinging up all over, so I pulled the rest up. I liked the porcelain tiles more, but the glue needed scraping off them. As I pulled the tiles up, I smelt bleach where people had presumably mopped the floor placed on them, soaked through and trapped between the layers.

The biggest headache has been power. As a tenanted property, the electricity and gas meters are ones needing a plastic stick and a card. They are old and bulky and very ugly. The gas one is low down in the front room, the electricity is high up in the hallway. So high up I couldn’t reach to even see the information screens. I had to borrow a ladder from a nearby lumberyard before I got my own stepladder.

 What’s more, being left for years, they’d both accumulated large debts, which were extremely difficult to write off. When I sorted that out, I scheduled someone to install smart-meters so I could switch to a better company, he couldn’t do it because the current electricity meter is installed so unsafely.

The very first job I did was the easiest. Mine is a red brick house and people have scraped and carved their names in the bricks. I don’t mind those names, I sometimes wonder who ‘Roy’ was. I did mind the swastika though. I picked up a red brick that was laying around and scraped that symbol off the wall. Still the easiest and most satisfying job I’ve done.

Yet, through it all, I’ve grown to love my house, even as it throws problem after problem at me. I’ve named her Jane, after Calamity Jane. Today I found out the area I’m moving to is the second most deprived ward in the country, there’s a whole youtube genre of people taking their cameras and filming poverty porn around the streets I’m soon to call mine. I feel a bit sorry for poor old Jane, old and unloved as she is and peculiarly, each set back seems to make me more determined to create the cosy, productive hideaway I’m after. I’ve worked hard on Jane, three hours after every work day and another eight on Saturdays. It's been difficult.

 Although she won’t be totally ready when I move in, I’ll still have access to bedrooms, heating and hot water, a washing machine and more space than I ever had in my London attics. She might not be home yet, but she will be. Like Strephon in Swift’s poem, I’ve seen the stinking ooze, but like the narrator of the poem, I’ll appreciate her beauty all the more for that.