Let the blog see the rabbit...

Yesterday, Graham, Heather and I went back down to Maidstone to help Ellen and Ben with more work on their house.

On Sunday, they had stripped the wallpaper in the dining room and we continued with wallpaper stripping in the living room. The highest priority though was getting the carpets up so that when the woodworm treatment people came today they could get straight on with it.

In most rooms, there were at least three layers to be removed - carpet, underlay and lino. I had the job of removing gripper rods from the edges of the rooms, which I then put into the drawers of various bits of tatty old MDF furniture which were being disposed of anyway. These we dubbed the "drawers of death" what with all the nasty pointy nails on sticks they contained. During the course of the day, Ben and I made numerous trips to the tip with assorted carpets and smashed-up furniture - we had to smash it up to fit it in the car. Sticking long bits of MDF over the kerb and jumping on them to break them into smaller bits is fun. :-)

Later in the afternoon, Ellen decided to investigate the fireplaces in the bedrooms and discovered a couple of original cast iron fireplaces which she was very pleased with.

We were about to leave when we realised that we hadn't dealt with the floor in the kitchen which we had originally thought was concrete and so wouldn't need woodworm treatment. However, after jumping up and down on it a few times, we established that it was sufficiently springy to definitely have floorboards. So the synthetic lino-type stuff came up. Under that, we found sheet hardboard that had been rather over-enthusiastically stapled down. We got some of that up to reveal a 1950s tiled floor, which had been glued to lino apparently using tar. The lino had then been glued to the floorboards. Rather a lot of work with a hefty screwdriver and a large hammer finally got  that up and we left Maidstone about an hour and a half later than anticipated.