Of mice and men wine... and sand

Tom and I were in France, clearing the floor of the upstairs bedroom.  As well as the terra cotta tiles there was a layer of sand anything up to four inches deep.  And the room measures 16 feet by 20!  By early afternoon the stacks of tiles and the rubble bags of sand were taking up so much room that I had to start taking the bags out. The narrow, steep, twisting staircase made this an awkward job, and by the time I had been downstairs a dozen times with a sack in each hand, and climbed back up a dozen times, I knew I had been working.

It wasn’t just sand we were digging out. There were a couple of wine bottles (both empty) and a nest of petrified baby mice. Presumably they had starved to death after their mother had been killed and the dry, sandy environment had preserved them. I did think briefly of seeing if any natural history museum would be interested but decided that I had neither the inclination nor the time – nor sufficient French – to make it worth bothering.

Tom and I weren’t quite so eager to start work the next day, and even less eager the day after that, but by the end of a week we had filled so many sacks with sand that one of the outhouses was completely full. I started carrying the tiles downstairs in my arms, but at Tom’s suggestion we went out and bought a square bucket which we tied on a rope and which Tom lowered from the window after filling it with tiles. The tiles filled another outhouse, with a smaller pile in the so-called garage. At some time I would have to work out just how to dispose of them, but not this week.

We swept up the last of the sand, wondering again how on earth it had been prevented from falling through the gaps between the floorboards. In some places those gaps were more than an inch wide, but at least the boards were sound enough for us to walk on them safely and would provide a good base for the new joists.

Over the coffee after our last evening’s meal, Tom and I tried to calculate how much we had removed from the bedroom during the week. The room measures sixteen feet by twenty, with a corner cut out to take the stairs from the ground floor and those up to the loft. The tiles were about eight inches square and three-quarters of an inch thick. Under them was the sand, which varied in depth from two inches to four inches or more, but we allowed an average of three inches. I can’t recall now how we calculated the weight – perhaps Tom knew the weight of a cubic foot of sand, that being just the sort of thing he would know – but at a rough estimate we reckoned we had shifted three tons. And, of course, we had done it twice – once when lifting the tiles and digging up the sand, and again when we carted everything downstairs. No wonder I was shattered!