Timber!

I was telling you about how I set about replacing the floor of the upstairs bedroom of our French cottage.  Tom, my next-door neighbour in England, had spent a week with me clearing the old floor.  Now my friend Chris and I had to construct the replacement. This was the really tricky part. The door from the bedroom opens directly onto the stairs, and the bedroom floor needed to be level with the top of the last riser on the staircase. Somehow Chris and I would have to ensure that the new joists were positioned just far enough above the floorboards for the addition of loft panels, underlay and laminate flooring to bring the level up to the top of the riser, no farther, and no lower. But first we had to buy the timber for the joists.

We didn’t really expect Mr Bricolage to have what we wanted, so we were not disappointed, and we did find a proper timber merchant quite easily. They had exactly the timber we wanted, the metric equivalent of two inches by three inches, but in five metre lengths only. There was no way I could carry five metre lengths of timber either inside the car or on top of it.

In our pidgin French we explained the problem.

‘OK,’ said the timber merchant, and immediately set about cutting them in half, for which he added a small fortune to the original price.

We now had twenty-eight two-and-a-half metre lengths of two by three which had to be transported back to the house – far too much for one load. Chris, fortunately, was not so coy about waiting by the side of the road as Mrs S had been – but then, he wouldn’t be standing beside a double mattress – so we loaded up as much as we thought the car would take. The length of the timber meant that it came through from the boot and over the top of the front passenger seat, but there was enough space for me to peer underneath it to see if the road to the left was clear. I took left-hand bends very slowly, having no wish to be hit on the ear by a ton or so of timber. Chris had to sit behind me on the second trip and he was able to hold the timber in place so I didn’t have the same problem.

The next thing was to get the timber up to the bedroom. We spent several minutes trying to bend a length of two by three to get it up the stairs, contorting ourselves into all sorts of unnatural positions in the process, before the obvious occurred to us. A length of rope and an open window would be much easier.

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This picture was taken in the upstairs bedroom before the floor had become seriously bad but you can see how it was even then uneven and had cracked and broken tiles.