Falling down around our ears
We pull the ceiling down.

Well, that's possibly a slight exaggeration. We actually only pulled down the ceiling over our bay window.

What starts as "I’ll just pull back this bit of plaster" rapidly turns into, "Well we've come this far, might as well pull it all down".

So we do.

Dust and grit rain down on us as we attack the ceiling with a claw hammer.

When the dust settles (in both a literary and metaphorical sense) we examine what lay behind it. The good news is most of the woodwork is in fine fettle; the bad news is that some of it isn’t.

In an effort to repair some of the damage, we make our weekly trip to Wickes and buy two large sheets of plasterboard and a piece of wood and transport it back home in the back of a Nissan Micra.

I don't know what it is about the Micra, but to date it's carried everything I've asked it to, including a two-seater sofa, a twelve foot ladder and 3m piece of kitchen worktop with the minimum of fuss (although obviously not all at the same time). It truly is the Mary Poppins carpet bag of cars, with storage capacity to rival the Tardis, with the added advantage that I don't need a sonic screwdriver to make it work.

With a constant stream of obscenities directed at the dust and grit that keeps landing in my mouth and eyes, we fix the hole with the maximum of fuss, and I realise how similar to my father I can be, and how I lack the patience to really enjoy DIY.

Still, the hole is repaired and the threat of the ceiling falling in is hopefully averted.
- posted by Paul @ 12:26 pm