18. The Shed…
Here you see the interior of a little ‘sun-room’
attached to back of my new house. (Well, it was built in 1930 actually.) But
now that at last the weather is bucking up a little – it’s been atrocious for
the last 3 weeks – the expected ‘Spring Cleaning’ thing has started. It’s quite
nice to have breakfast in there, and so all the garden tools & stuff that
have lived in there willy-nilly over the Winter have got to go somewhere else.
The Garden Shed is the obvious place.
There it is: balancing a little precariously on its
underlying timbers. It actually has a net curtain in the window, which is
rather nice. But it’s a mess inside. I think, in fact I know, that the couple
who lived in house before me, were old; and indeed, the elderly lady passed
away, which is why the house came on the market. I don’t know about her
husband. It’s a nice little house, and has taken to me very well I think; and I
respect the people who lived in it before. But still: The Shed must be
cleared…
This is a view of some of it. It is all
like this, and a shelf unit has fallen over, scattering all the tins, jars,
containers & other things all over the floor. So you can’t actually go
inside because the floor is full of stuff. We must simply work away at it bit
by bit. It may well be that there are some things in there that are useful and
can be retained.
So far so good. We have got about half
the stuff out now. Incidentally, that sheet of corrugated plastic: that wasn’t
in there when I moved in last September. I bought that about a fortnight ago,
in a misguided attempt to build a small shelter for 2 bicycles, which had also
over-wintered in the sun-room. I screwed it to the wall of the house with
wooden battens mounted on hinges. I had to buy a hammer-drill to make the holes
in the brick-work for the hinges; it was only £60 – but then we all need a
hammer-drill anyway - and the plastic sheet and the wood and the nuts &
bolts & washers cost about £30. (I already had the hinges.) The big white
bundle of polythene (£2.75) in front of the plastic sheet was supposed to hang
down in front of the bicycles to stop the rain lashing against them from the
sides. In fact, after spending the best part of a day on this exercise, it
suddenly dawned on me that you might
be able to buy plastic ‘bicycle covers’ to drape over the bikes. This indeed
proved to be the case, so the bikes are now secure from the elements under
exactly such covers, which cost £9 each – I thought they were expensive at
that, since they are just big plastic bags! Still, the corrugated plastic sheet
you see here surely has a great future as the top of a propagating frame? And
the hammer drill is bound to come in handy time & time again! <8^)
The stuff is now all out. It doesn’t look
as big spread out like this as it did when it was all inside The Shed! It was
during this time that the car battery fell on my foot. There were actually two
car batteries in the shed, and even two
half-full bags of cement that had solidified of their own accord, rather than
just one as one might have expected. One of the car batteries was a large
‘heavy-duty’ type, but it had a built-in handle, so that made it easier to
carry. Unfortunately, just as I was carrying it out of The Shed, the handle
broke, and it fell. I think I was quite lucky, as it didn’t land fair &
square on my foot. Probably one side of it hit the ground, breaking its fall,
and only then did it fall flat, on my foot. The big toe of my left foot is
still aching, but less than before, now I think of it.
Excellent! The Shed is empty – apart from
some bits of wood that might come in handy, plus the plastic sheet, and the
string – of which more anon. By the way, we did not go at this job ‘hammer and
tongs’; no. We would work for say 10 minutes, then go & make a cup of tea
& sit down, surveying what we had done, with some satisfaction, but also
with some misgiving at what was still to come. After 5 minutes or so we would
begin again.
The result of all this carefully-planned
effort, was a complex row of stuff stretching down to the street. However, all
the paint cans were collected together so that they could be dealt with in case
of problems at the recycling centre. What more can one say? By now it was
lunch-time, so we had three quarters of an hour off. It might not have been
that long, as we began to ‘stiffen up’, and the idea of leaving all this stuff
for our neighbours to see when they came home was not a good one.
I forgot to say that we swept the cobwebs
off the ceiling & walls of The Shed, but it was not until later that we
noticed a large number of nails sticking down through the wooden ceiling to a
length of at least one inch (2.54cm). Fortunately, I am only 5’ 7” tall, so was
unlikely to incise the top of my head by simply walking about inside. On the
other hand, if I had chosen to celebrate the clearing of The Shed by jumping up
and down in an impromptu ‘Dance Of Joy’ (which on other occasions I have been
known to do), I might, quite possibly, not be sitting here now writing this
drivel but in Intensive Care or even possibly dead, having punctured my skull
with a rusty nail. Don’t really bear thinking about, do it?
There remains little to be said: it did
all go in the car – just! A fairly large population of woodlice went along too.
They’re not too bad really: as far as I know, woodlice evolved so long ago
& have probably remained unchanged for so long that they are no danger to
the health of Homo sapiens? Much like
silverfish – they lived in my kitchen in the old house – but are really
ancient, and probably don’t carry diseases deleterious to man. Of course, I
could be wrong…
This is the queue of cars waiting to get
into the Recycling Centre. I had quite forgotten that this is Easter Holiday
week, so many people were taking stuff to get rid of. Normally there’s not a
queue on weekdays. When clearing my old house, I learned that very quickly! One
time, I took a car-load of junk on Saturday afternoon, and had to queue for 45
minutes to get into the place…
Back home again, all accomplished! Well,
one old screwdriver had lodged itself out of sight – that’s its wooden handle
you can see there. I don’t mind admitting we were extremely tired, the whole
exercise having occupied us from about 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., but a cup of
coffee and a nice hot bath soon set us up again. There is even more
satisfaction because Clearing The Shed was by far the
largest task that remained to us after moving house. Therefore, other tasks
which remain – and there a number of these – are all less than this one. So we shall be able to tackle those with the
cheery assurance that the worst is behind us!
* Magnus Magnusson
is probably best known as the host of ‘Mastermind’, the television general (and
specialist) knowledge quiz game. You can read more about it here: http://www.quizplayers.com/w/QP:Mastermind - but the salient thing was, at the end of the
2-minute intensive question period, if Magnus had just begun a question when
the time signal sounded, he would
quickly say: ‘I’ve started, so I’ll finish.’, and that question was thus valid
for the contestant. It became a catch-phrase, of course.
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