Another weekend, another new skill...

Well, it's been a busy weekend. Decided that some of our floorboards really needed some attention - that much sagging couldn't be healthy...

So the day started with a trip to Howarth Timber and Building Merchants, a cornerstone of probably one of the worst traffic complexes in all of London - Brockley Cross. You wouldn't have thought that much chaos could be engineered in such a small space. And yet..

Anyway, Howarth's was one of the slightly more intimidating hardware stores I've been to. Not often you have to ask if somewhere does actually do Retail! But for all that, they were really friendly and helpful and now if ever I need wood or anything at all to do with fitting or shaping or otherwise messing with wood I will know where to go. I think we must have seemed such rookies - the newbie DIY kids with no clue what do do...

Getting back to the house, sure enough it was an unholy mess underneath the sagging floorboards, with some of them resting on live electricity cables. Nice.

Bit of shaping, hammering, sawing later, it started to look pretty good.

I have two books to thank for this little feat. One a book my Dad gave me from back when he was doing something similar to a house from a similar era - an early 1980s Readers Digest 'Looking after your (you may as well add 'Victorian' here) Home' which is ace - all the basics including stuff that you don't even have to do anymore, like make your own rawlplugs out of wooden dowel... And another - The Victorian House manual. Which is by Haynes, they of the VW combi maintenance guide fame. Brill. But they make everthing sound like armageddon and what do you think you've done buying a Victorian property...

All things considered though, enjoying my foray into flooring techniques...