Domus Renovatio!: 6. Ground work, part one

Legal beagles. Love them or hate them they do have their uses where charm, good looks or nepotism fails. I came to realise this after a chance phone call from our nice solicitor where I mentioned that we'd decided we didn't want to move our precious things into the house on top of the old lady carpets. No disrespect to Mrs H. - she seemed to run a very tight ship, especially at 94, keeping the house amazingly clean and the garden in order - but carpets are basically filth sponges and were cast out of Australian culture during the new renaissance along with the six-o'clock swill and weeing on pub walls. So we asked the nice estate agent Phil if we could get access to the house before settlement to remove the carpets, but he seemed to finally run out of his bottomless congeniality and stalled for time until it was too late. What was he playing at?

"Leave it to me" said the nice solicitor on the Thursday before the final weekend of limbo, "that shouldn't be a problem". "But we ticked the carpet box on the contract", I worried "... how much will this cost?". He just laughed. But Phil wasn't laughing the next day when he called. "Erm so the lawyers have given permission to visit the house this weekend to remove the carpets. So you can pick up the keys tomorrow... but ... Pip, erm please - be careful!".

So we started being careful in the front left bedroom with the fireplace and soon discovered the carpet was cunningly installed, with its underlay, on top of the most beautiful heritage lino.

Luckily they'd remembered to thoroughly glue it to the floor boards.

And so the scraping begins. But first a quick thanks to Mum and Dad for the gloves! There's nothing quite like good British gloves to protect you from the biting cold, preventing conviction for petty crimes or delving into the combined muck of a hundred years.

Words cannot express how happy Gen was to get down and dirty with these floorboards.

After trying turps and meths on the glue without effect we were about to give up, when suddenly the words of my O-level chemistry teacher Goolie (so named for the 50 Gauloise cigarettes he smoked a day with his one remaining lung) came like a message from a spiritual Jedi master: "Use the polar solvent!" So to Gen soon found me sprinkling the floor with a watering can and furiously scrubbing with a garden broom.

Out of the muck emerges the original tiled hearth.

The hearth begins to emerge.

Sadly, while nailing the smooth-edge down, the carpet fitter failed to notice the first couple of nails bouncing off the tile and stone hearth and steadfastly continued to smash a neat line of dim-witted destruction into the otherwise perfectly restorable fireplace.