Twenty-Four: The ‘A’ Word

This week: The Shack bares its teeth!

It is mid-week during the half-term break, and my wife and I find ourselves free of The Boy. We have dropped him off at Bovington RSC stables to help at an event (read as ‘shovelling pony poo and picking up showjumping poles’). We, on the other hand, are setting our course for The Shack. We are West Lulworth-bound.

We’ve arranged to meet there with Will the Builder and Derek the Architect. In fact, like the hosts of some awkward Nineties dating show, we are bringing the two together for the first time. Upon arrival, activity is evident. A guy who looks old enough to be challenged by manipulating a Zimmer frame is backing a lorry onto our sloping driveway and dropping of the largest skip I have ever seen. My Wife watches in awe: both of us have struggled to reverse park here without flattening the opposite neighbour’s privet – and that’s in an average-sizded saloon. ‘How the hell is he doing that?’ she gasps.

I suddenly feel inadequate. ‘He’s had plenty of practice,’ I mumble. ‘Let’s see how he’d cope introducing thirty-one disaffected adolescents to eighteenth-century love poetry.’ Deep down, though, I admire the talent.

Within minutes, Will the Builder appears in a shiny, logo-emblazoned 4×4, apologising for an unsightly blemish on his nose. Apparently, he underestimated the strength of the sun whilst on a family skiing holiday the previous week. Although my wife has met Will on a handful of occasions on-site, this is a first acquaintance for me. I take comfort from initial impressions: ex-army and not your typical builder – although I do acknowledge that it’s early in our professional relationship to strike up a bromance. And while I don’t share his enthusiasm for skiing (and I suspect golf), the additional revelation that his kids go to prep school tell me that he’s earning enough to demonstrate more than a modicum of competency and success.

Previously, Will has been careful to deliver some preliminary bad news by email. Test results that he sent out for before beingen piste have returned it’s time to mention the ‘A’-word. ‘A’, dear reader, is for asbestos. Will refers to it as ‘the elephant in the room’; this is not only the elephant in the room, the elephant surrounding the room and the elephant tap-dancing on the bloody roof of the room to boot. It transpires that The Shack wears asbestos as liberally as Charlie Sheen wears cocaine. It’s in the original walls, it’s in some of the floor tiles, and the original rood is virtually made of the stuff. Asbestos was a post-war thang – a relatively cheap yet resilient material that prudent1950s builders swore by. ‘But this was an age where your doctor prescribed a twenty-pack of Gold Flake for healthy respiration,’ Will reminds us.

In short, this is not good news. Our plans for The Shack required taking down the chimney breast to completely reconfigure the floorplan. This would involve disturbing the roof which, now finding out it being made of asbestos, would require a new roof entirely. On the spot, we decide to keep the chimney breast and sack the lovely walk-through wardrobe we had planned for our bedroom. Will then points to some of the uncovered asbestos floor tiles, and I find myself recoiling behind my wife whilst feeling a tad disappointed that they aren’t glowing, as I’d imagined.

All of this sounds like a horrific echo of our Salisbury experiences and I wonder if this this is something that happens to everyone undergoing building work or of it’s just us. I should be pressing him on this, asking for a second opinion or exploring alternatives. Instead, I just feel myself nodding and grinning like a village idiot, stupidly agreeing to every sentence that seems to add further complications or expense to our disintegrating plans. I think back to my sister moving into her new place. When I asked her what she thought about a ‘cheeky chappie’ decorator she’d just hired, she’d said, ‘Oh, he’s great – we have a right laugh!’ She’d gone on to say the same about the bloke who quoted on fitted blinds – and a man who’d installed built-in wardrobes. It was as though their ability to make her laugh ran parallel with their skills. ‘I’m not sure why she didn’t just hire Bradley bloody Walsh to do everything,’ I say to my wife.

It wasn’t supposed to be thus for me. After Salisbury, I had resolved to set up an Excel spreadsheet detailing every minutia of expenditure on a daily basis. ‘I’ll get Will to report back each week,’ I tell my wife. ‘Accountability is everything.’ But this turns out to be complete bollocks on my part: I have yet to set it up, and I fear we’ve already spent thousands on fees before a single wall has come down.

So instead, Will my wife and I nonchalantly trade cliches. We’ve had the elephant in the room, and now we’re talking about setting ducks up in rows whilst kicking cans further down the road at the same time. My aim for the next meeting is to send a completely fabricated idiom up the proverbial flagpole and see if Will salutes it:

‘Well, Will: you can stuff a wallaby’s pouch with Vegemite, but it’ll still shit corn.’ Way more fun than spreadsheets, I reckon.

After ten minutes of this, Derek the Architect turns up. Derek doesn’t look much like an architect. He’s decidedly old-school and is a man of few words. Unlike Will, there’s no fancy iPad and not even a smartphone in sight. It’s a stubby pencil and your good old fashioned tape-measure for Derek. One senses he’s nearer the end of his architectural journey that the beginning, but he does come with a side-kick called Evan. Evan turns up separately in a VW campervan and he looks like he’s stepped off the set of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A striped beanie perches atop his long locks, and he scratches his stubble and nods sagely on the rare occasion that Derek utters forth. You sense that, at some point, Evan will step into Derek’s size 9 Cotton Trader slip-ons, and morph into a round-spectacled, kaftan-wearing hipster.

Despite everything, we come away feeling content. The ‘A’ word to one side, work has finally begun to turn the ugly duckling that is The Shack into… well…a duck.

Twenty-Four: The ‘A’ Word

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