OMG! This is my bedroom

liam says…

Gravel… black, dusty gravel… pouring through the now broken windows of the back bedroom and the once cozy sitting room. Yes, in order to fill the two foot empty space that once provided a perfect environment to rot my floorboards, the diggerman… who was originally on hand to work on the yard… had to break the two large windows in the back of the house.

A terrible pain rolled over me as I watched the bucket push through the window… glass crashing… timber splitting… and dollars going, going, almost gone.

My cup was still half full… THANK HEAVENS THE DIGGERMAN WAS THERE. Without his bucket, this job would have taken three days, and although the windows would have been spared, we would have broken our backs hauling one wheelbarrow load after another through the front door. Instead, it took two hours with a cocktail hour tossed in for good measure… and the windows were due for replacement in the next five years, anyway.

The job would have been even easier if Michael the diggerman could have just pulled right up to the window, but the eaves of the cottage kept him just short of the opening. It took me, tradesman Dan and Michael the diggerman to jerry-rig a contraption made of two pieces of plywood and a brace to efficiently deliver the gravel indoors.

Michael the diggerman dumped bucketloads of gravel onto the boards. The stones slid down the chute through the opening of the bedroom window and into the two-foot cavity that was once my floor. Tradesman Dan and I spread the gravel evenly across the entire room.

Room one done. Cocktail hour! Out came the bottle of whiskey… sláinte all around (“to your health”) and some great craic.

Then it was back to work on the sitting room. Filling this room went much faster. A feat I can credit to me finally following the system and NOT standing in tradesman Dan’s way each time he turned.

We finished the job, and tradesman Dan tacked plywood over the holes where the windows used to be. Looking in from the hall at my “dirt floor,” I tried to remember how homey the rooms used to be.

Next up, pouring concrete over the floor… then there’s also the front bedroom and bathroom floors that will eventually need to be torn out at cemented over. Sigh, I didn’t budget for all these project, so cash is going to be tight for the next few months.

Dan and the first bucket of gravel	Bedroom gravel load-in complete
Dan's wife Sadie holds the whiskey in from cocktail hour	The scene... Knockahopple Cottage and the digger