Smackinamaowf

Well, here we all are. It's ten-thirty: time for more coffee. I began writing this post at one this morning, when I couldn't sleep: I tried sleeping again at two-thirty, but Ian was sleeping restlessly, worried by a busy week at work, and he kept hurling himself from one side to the other, shaking the bed and driving me mad. I got about four hours' kip on the sofa, eventually.

Here is a candid shot of the den in our basement.

This is how shit it has looked for nearly three years. I walk around this room five times a day picking up the same books, toys, food and clothes, and the children tear through it six times a day spraying books, toys, food and clothes all over it again. They have more energy for their task than I do for mine, so it is usually untidy, like this.

I hate that yellow sofa.

We have just ripped up and re-done the floor in here, and are having a sort of hiatus before doing even worse things to our house.

I made a video of the old floor, but Blogger won't upload it. I made a video so you would all understand how much I hated that floor. It was made from cheapo fuck-it pine floorboards, which shrank from each other in mutual disgust, and which went BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG! whenever children ran across them. It also went CREEEEAK, like an ancient galleon, and if one knew where to stand, as Ian did, one could fill the pauses between one's spoken opinions with poignant CREEEEAAAKKs by swaying gently back and forth, shifting one's weight between one's long, hairy feet. It was deafening, and I'm glad it's dead.

Beneath the shitty wooden floorboards was a concrete floor, as uneven as a rolling sea.

The room, when we moved in, had been cut into two rooms by some 1970s breezeblock, and when we tore down that wall, the two floors of those rooms proved to be slightly different heights. The floor we were left with was concrete, undulating, and with a 2"-high ridge bisecting the room, because we had better things to do than finish the demolition job properly. Esme, aged nearly two, learned to step carefully over the ridge that remained of the wall: we knocked together a coffee table to cover the worst of it. The rest of the ridge wore away as we trampled it, and we threw a rug over it anyway.

We lived like that for ten months, occasionally rolling back the rug to collect any bits of concrete that had been trodden loose from the ridge in the floor, until Ian decisively sorted it out by laying cheap wooden fuck-it floorboards over it one Saturday morning. You can read about that here, in a blog post in which I refer to the cheap, crap floor as "proper," because I had no idea how bad it would prove to be.

Ian made sure the crap floorboards would be level by stacking old vinyl floor tiles, puddles of cement, bits of wood, whatever, in the deepest dips of the uneven concrete floor as necessary, laying battens for the cheap shitty floorboards to rest upon. He insisted the floorboards would not need nailing down; that they could all be balanced. Ian is an intelligent, capable man, but sometimes he has these brain farts. He soon conceded that the floor would need nailing down after all: moreover, he had to drill a few 1" holes in it to put some big fuckoff bolts in to hold it still, because it bounced and went BANG! all over the place.

Here is Ian, a few weeks ago, taking those bolts out again.

Derek is sitting on the astonishingly cheap rag rug I bought from an eBay seller in West Ealing for £10 in 2008. It is huge; big enough to cover the entire crappy floor. It used to be orange, as you can see from the rolled-back underside, but after a few months in the company of our family, it was a colour that Farrow & Ball might call Exhumed: nondescript; wretched; filthy.

The way these things happen, in this house, is that we casually begin discussing our large-scale DIY plans at 10PM one night, and five minutes later, with fresh cups of tea, we are tearing the house down. That's how this started, too.

Then one gets up the next morning, to this,

and has no choice but to carry on.

I love this photo for Oscar's long comedy pyjama feet, and for his practising the Force on the disinterested cat.

We removed all the crap floorboards, and then we lived like this for about a week.

Every night, once the children were in bed, and we were dog-tired, we mixed a bucket of self-levelling cement, poured it into the massive uneven dip in the floor, and hoed it as smooth as possible.

Everything was covered in dust. We all had coughs. And yet a Zen air of calm settled on us like the dust: either because we enjoy doing this to ourselves, and find a certain peace in chaos; or because the most sanguine response to chaos is attrition.

The children loved it. Children love anarchy. Oscar trailed through the room every morning and hit it experimentally with tools, exclaiming with delight.

Here you can see Mat, who is a friend of ours from wayyyy back in York 20 years ago. Mat has a fast, relentless, hilarious wit, and works incredibly hard: he is the perfect right-hand man for insane Cornwell DIY storms.

In 1998, I bought my first car, a 1972 VW camper van, and had to make that terrifying first drive without a driving instructor. I'd never driven through inner South London, either, nor had I ever driven anything other than a Nissan idiot-friendly modern car, let alone an ancient bus whose gearstick was just a stick that stuck out of the floor. Mat was my co-pilot. He got us all utterly stoned on Brixton super-skunk, then sat in the passenger seat up front of the bus and calmly kept up a monologue of bollocks that kept me grounded all the way from Fulham to Camberwell, boxed out of my mind, through broken traffic lights at Clapham Common and the point at which the bus suddenly stopped in four-lane traffic and my face went white. "Just switch it off, slip it into neutral and start it up again," said Mat, casually, and I did, and the bus kept going: no one died. I only found out when he was helping us do our floor that he'd been banned from driving at the time.

Mat has just returned to England from three years in Italy, where he'd been building houses with people who spoke about as little English as he speaks Italian. I asked him to teach me to swear in Italian, because I enjoy singing "Motherfucker" in a long, drawn-out soprano, but I cannot, in front of the children. He taught me to say some filthy Italian things that I was very pleased with, and then he told me about a similar conversation he'd had with one of his Italian colleagues.

"He was asking me for English phrases, a bit like you are," Mat said. "I taught him, 'Do you want a smack in the mouth?' He only caught the last bit, 'Smackinamowf.' I taught him to say it with a strong South London accent, so he says it sort of half London and half Italian, smackinamaowf."

Smackinamaowf has become my new expletive, exclamation, mantra, my new everything. When Oscar is tired, I croon it softly in his ear. Smackinamaowf. When I finish painting a patch of wall, I say it with a pleased smile: Smackinamaowf. When I thwack a mosquito: Smackinamaowf! It travels everywhere with me. "Thank you for using Sainsburys Self-Service Checkout." Smackinamaowf. I shall say it when I finish writing this post.

Mat and Ian spent a long, long day laying our new floor, a flat, even, floor that does not go BANG! and that looks like this:

I thought about painting the room green,

but it would have been a bad idea, like getting my hair cut.

So the room stayed brown. It is not a very photogenic colour, but it makes sense once you're in here.

Then we put another rug down, a nice one this time. It is 20 years old, and altogether a far more beautiful eBay rug than the big orange post-mortem we just threw out.

Here it appears that my chair has grown Lumps. It has not grown Lumps. That is the fabric with which I will one day cover the yellow sofa that I hate so very much.

Also, don't look at all that stuff on top of the piano. That's the bit I haven't tidied up yet.

As soon as the rug was unrolled, it made me want to smoke a joint and stare at it, and that was when I realised that although I don't smoke pot any more, I still like to have a room in the house that would be perfect in which to smoke pot; and that was when I worked out that I stopped smoking pot 10 YEARS AGO, almost to the day, and then I felt old.

Anyway.

We haven't finished yet. We have barely started. We still have to destroy the wall between the kitchen/bathroom and make it into one big kitchen. We still have to build a new bathroom. We still have to tidy up the corners and finishing-touches to this room. Every day, I get up, I feed and dress the children, I wait until they're awake and happy enough to bimble off and play together, then I start sanding, plastering, painting, whatever it is. I stop when the children need something, and I carry on again as soon as I can. Once they're in bed at night, I immediately open a pot of plaster or finishing-skim or paint and get on with it. There is no time to lose. That's all I've been doing.

It occurred to me a few days ago that some people, somewhere, must buy houses, move into them, and just ... live in them. I expect our children will learn enough from watching us to insist on doing just that.

How are you?