A Tale in two halves, Part Two

After that brilliant punchline at the end of Part One, to resume……

By the time all the decorating was finished, we finally got round to sorting out the garage.
Using cardboard boxes, we’d been extremely careful packing everything from the previous house. We only had one breakage and that was in a box packed by the Professionals, for which we were never compensated, but then I hated that glass frying pan anyway.
It had been some months since our move, so we were a little anxious that things like our spare bedding and cuddly toys hadn’t got damp.
Actually, they were all perfectly dry, but we ended up throwing a lot away regardless.

Like Mum opening her flour cannister all those years ago, I opened one box to a family of furry faces in a nest of Basil Brush and Kermit the Frog.

In another, the tartan car blanket was in shreds, and the little blighters were all sporting matching outfits.
We carried four boxes with evidence of invasion out into the garden, tipped them on their sides and just watched as a rather large number of little field mice scurried out and legged it up over the ivy and onto the embankment leading down to the main road below.
We never saw another mouse in all the years we lived there.

However, when we came to sell, one of the many criticisms of our property was the layout, and due to a delay in the actual date of my redundancy, we lost a potential sale,  so took the house off the market and did a little revamp.

We decided to make the third room into a small bedroom by replacing the back door with a window and blocking up the doorway into the second bedroom (it made a very nice recessed bookcase).
However, we needed access to the second bedroom, so knocked a doorway through from the first bedroom.
The lounge/diner was then divided by a stud partition wall (it had 2 doors off the hallway) to make a large front bedroom and back lounge, then the wall between that and the first bedroom was removed to make a new, but smaller lounge/diner, replacing what had been the bedroom window with patio doors.

Sylvester Stallone has got nothing on me when it comes to demolition. I took the sledgehammer to the wall and with one thump, practically the whole lot went!
It took less than an hour to take the wall out as it hadn’t been ‘tied in’ to the original building, and over five hours to clean up.
When I told my workmates on Monday morning, they all sang in chorus ‘Right Said Fred’…………….

Advertisement