House of Mud

"Hold it up Mike."
"I'm trying to. This isn't bloody easy you know."
The board dropped down at one end, getting very close to the breaking
point. I jumped underneath and screwed it to the roof joist. We were
putting up plaster boards. Neither of us had done anything like this
before. It was really a case of the blind leading the blind.
The house is one that my wife inherited from her Grandma. Built in
1933, from whatever materials were lying around at the time it seems.
No two nails are the same length, wooden boards are different
thicknesses. The inside walls are made of a stuff that looks for all
the world like mud and gravel mixed with straw and bits of wood. The
locals say it is called lehm and a lot of houses were built this way at
that time. I looked the word up in my translation dictionary: Lehm=
Loam or clay. I had been under the impression that building in clay
went out of fashion with the Pharaoh's. You live and learn.
We are in Germany. Mike and I were a couple of wonderers who met each
other while on a job in the south of the country. We then met a couple
of girls who talked us into marrying them and have been here ever
since.
Here for me is a small village on the edge of the Schw?bische Alb. An
area of hills and limestone formations left over from when southern
Germany was a shallow sea populated by swimming dinosaurs. Mike lives a
hundred kilometers away in the German Alps.
Our present problems started with the DIY books. Being Brits, we tend
to order all our books in English. After carefully studying our Collins
DIY manual we made our way to the local DIY shop, only to find that all
the stuff on our wish list didn't exist in Germany and nobody knew what
we were talking about. After a long question and answer session, we
finally got all our gear together and went back to start the real work
of refurbishing my attic.
The boards were too long to get up the stairs. We had to store and cut
them out in the back garden and hope the it didn't rain in between
times. Then we discovered that there was a way of getting them upstairs
if we risked a few bruises. Because neither the walls nor the floor are
flat or parallel we had a bit of a job finding a starting point. In the
end we used the door jam - which is also not flat or parallel but is
better than any thing else in the room.
We then discovered the joys of two people trying to hold a 2.6 meter
long piece of floppy, fragile plaster board up to the ceiling and screw
it in place at the same time. Human beings just don't have enough
limbs. My wife and cat left the house to escape the shouting and
cursing that was at times bordering on outright war.
Eventually we managed to get all the boards up, after a fashion. In
fact it doesn't really look too bad. Of course afterwards people came
by saying, why didn't you do it this way or that way. Funny thing is,
these are the same people who, when asked for advice before hand denied
all knowledge of renovations.
Mike has now gone off to Tunisia for two weeks rest. I will wait for
him to come back and then ask him if he fancies trying his hand at a
bit of plastering. If you ever want to test a friendship, try
renovating an old house together.
The story continues............