Becca Jane St Clair

There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a little crooked house

Our house has charm. It was built in the 1840s as a farmhouse (and all the farmland is now our village) and then divided into two houses in the 1930s. I know I’ve mentioned our house oddities before, but our house isn’t divided equally. Our bathroom is in Dave (our neighbour)’s “half” – ish. No, we don’t actually go to the bathroom on his side, but our bathroom juts out into what would be his sitting room/lounge, so if we’re in the bathroom, we can hear his telly, and he can probably hear everything that goes on in our bathroom (ewww). It also means our bathroom is located under his spare room. Get it? No? Hmm. Here’s a crappy MSPaint drawing I made:

So, our house has character. The woman who lived here before Tim bought it was fond of hiring “cowboy builders” to fix things, so we find all sorts of new oddities all the time. Like how we can’t really hang anything on the outer walls of the house because the wall is so soft, you stick a drill in and could practically write your name with it. Or how instead of taking out the exterior toilet, concrete was just poured into it, making it loads of fun for Tim to remove…and making even more fun this past January when it flooded the workshop because it was never actually disconnected from the water, they just put a cap on the pipe. Yeah. Oh? And even more fun with the splitting the house into two? If you look hard enough, you can still see where the doorways should be into the other half.

But we love our house to bits, and if anyone doesn’t like it, they can sod off. Sure, we might be living with dusty floors for a while longer until we can get walls re-plastered and the windows don’t match because for whatever reason, the previous owner only replaced two front windows instead of all three (we will get matching windows when we get double glazing), but it’s still our house. Our loveable, quirky house.

Today, my friend Helen came over to help me patch up the wallpaper in what should be our bedroom. To make a long story short – a brick fell through the roof and it made a hole in the ceiling of the bedroom, so we had it fixed, and now that we’re redecorating the bedroom so we can move back in, needed to put new wallpaper on the damaged part (that chipboard lining stuff). I say Helen came over to help, but really, she did all of it and I only held the paper. But she knew what she was doing, so it was probably for the best!

While we were mending the ripped paper on the ceiling, we noticed that the ceiling is in fact, crooked. She put up the first strip straight, but then the second strip went up and even though the seams matched, it was crooked. We also discovered a nasty floorboard that seems to rock if you stand on it….only, it’s not floorboard size and feels like a rectangle of chipboard. Who knows what we will discover when we pull up the original carpet. Looks like we might have to add “fix floorboards” to the list of things to do in the bedroom! Particularly since the wonky floorboard is right where we plan on putting the wardrobe….really don’t want that thing to fall on me, thanks.

But the good news is, we aren’t on as tight of a schedule as we originally were. I think I mentioned this before, but we were getting our “new” bedroom furniture from someone who was downsizing from a three-bedroom to a two-bedroom, and they expected to move at the beginning of April. Well, the offer for their house fell flat (person never contacted them again after a counter offer!), so they aren’t ready to part with the furniture yet. But like I said, it just means we have more time to do the redecorating, and if the bedroom is done before we can get the new stuff, we’ll just move our existing furniture into the room. No big deal. So the current plan is to get the bedroom painted the last week of March while Tim has off to help me, then sometime in April see about getting new carpet put in. My goal is for us to be in our redecorated bedroom by June, but May would be even better if we could pull it off somehow in between Region 31 convention and Tim’s training for his MOM position. Yeah, probably not likely.

I posted pics of the wall to facebook, but here’s the photos again:

The paper looks yellowed for two reasons – 1) the walls are still yellow and 2) we were using up the ends of some rolls of paper Helen had in her loft (US: attic). It will all get painted over in a few weeks anyway, and you’ll never even know that it was old wallpaper or that it even had been patched!

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