Shed Reality.

Whether it’s the loss of Derek or a diversion from really wanting to keep pigeons I decided to clean out the shed. This quickly changes to shed refurbishment, and as a sideline a search for reality. It’s half of one of those brick back-to-back sheds of the 1920’s period with remnants of a chimney and anaglypta wallpaper behind a wall cupboard. It had obviously seen better days. Most of the paint was a loose fit on the plaster walls, which themselves were close but not connected to the brickwork. Hammer and chisel dispensed with the majority leaving unsightly belligerent lumps. The brickwork was part slimy, part whitewashed. What stupid bugger plasters over whitewash! The slime was water based, constantly irrigated from a leak somewhere. On inspection the back of the wooden gutter was mulch making the down pipe superfluous as all the water was obviously being diverted into the brickwork. Rip off gutter, replace rotten end of lintel and fit new gutter. Now the fun part. Power wash the inside walls to get to a surface that was firmly attached to, well anything, I wasn’t too fussy by this point. After a few minutes I’m covered in water and grit, and the floor is a pond. After brief thoughts of an indoor swimming pool and Jacuzzi I sweep out the water and repeat. I now have fairly solid surfaces to paint. It now becomes obvious that in the 1920’s there were no such things as power drills, Screwfix etc. hence they had no reason to make bricks soft enough to drill into. They also connected these diamond hard bricks with mortar hardly more substantial than beach sand. My solid surfaces were immune to attachment of the electrics I intended to fit, except that is for the lath and plaster ceiling, which as anyone with experience of lath and plaster will tell you, is itself somewhat of a bouncy enigma. So, although I’m down to the surfaces of reality they are proving surprisingly immutable. It just goes to show, even if one does the hard emotional work of getting to reality one tends to find it frustratingly difficult to change.