Lagging Behind

My immediate fate looms over me.  It is in the attic.

When we bought this bungalow we were made aware that it had a very high energy efficiency rating, but the very first trip into the loft for a good old post-move rummage showed that all was not quite as it should be.  The whole roof space is covered in floorboards that are absolutely fine as long as you don’t want to stand on them.  When the loose ones are lifted it is immediately noticeable that something is missing.  There is more insulation in a lace fedora.  I have a number of theories: perhaps the inspector was scared of heights and couldn’t face the trip to the top of the loft ladder; or he wasn’t scared of heights at all, but the batteries were flat in his torch, or maybe somebody stole all the insulation between his inspection and the onset of our residence.  Our old fully insulated house had a ‘D’ rating, whilst the bungalow is ‘B’ due, it would seem, to the presence of solar panels and a generally sunny disposition.  Nonetheless, the general wadding deficiency is something I feel that I must address before winter closes in.  The plan is relatively straightforward: remove old and sagging floorboards; add a new section of raised floorboards with insulation underneath and top up insulation elsewhere.  So simple.  Let me talk you through it…

…Entrance to the loft is through a hatch and a ladder that has insufficient space to fully lock into place.  The space is tight, the climb is steep and involves removing a section of my scalp on the latch every single flippin’ time I go up.  Once I manoeuvre my head through the gap it is simple to lever the rest of me through, opening a wound the size of the Mariana Trench along my spine on the self-same latch.  I fear that after the few hundred ascents that completion of the work will require, I will not be able to get out of a chair without hoists.  Not necessarily a bad thing, because walking is the last thing I want to be doing up there.  No sane person would wander about between our eaves without a head-to-toe rubber suit and a fully comprehensive insurance policy.

I am actually lurching, Quasimodo-like, from rafter to rafter, acutely aware that the entire space is full of electrical cables and unidentified copper pipes.  One mis-step and I will be one floor down amongst plasterboard shards, naked electrical cables and water.  In the odd place where the floorboards actually touch the rafters, they are nailed in place because whoever fitted them found a screwdriver too difficult to operate.  Removal is tortuous.  Each board takes about half an hour to lift and then must be brought down the ladder with a clearance of about 1mm to each side providing I plane the surface from my knuckles – which I do repeatedly – and is followed by the almost ritual shucking of scalp on the way back up.

After the old floorboards are lifted glass-fibre insulation matting must be laid and so my wife has bought me a head to toe ‘forensic’ boiler suit to work in, gloves and a mask.  Outside it is about 20 degrees (centigrade) in the suit it is about 50.  I am slowly being rendered.  I have divested myself of all clothing underneath bar a T shirt and pants (boxers) which are plastered to me like a supermodel’s see-through ensemble when demurely attempting to avoid publicity at a billionaire’s swim party.  I am not a pretty sight.

After the new insulation has gone down – if I can get across the old stuff without crashing through the ceiling – I am going to raise a new section of floorboards on recently purchased stilts, which appear both fragile and frankly, frighteningly bendy.  They also each have four screw slots to fit them to the joists but the bases are wider than the beams – despite being the stated size – and the screws have to go in at an angle that means that the electric screwdriver will not quite fit in, but believe me, with 200 screws to put in, I will find a way.  My wrist will barely support a full glass of single malt these days, let alone drive in that number of fittings.  If I can’t make it work it will be back to superglue.

Twelve hours of solid toil during which I have drunk gallons of water, only to discover that the toilet arrangements sewn into disposable boiler suits are sadly inadequate, sees me half way to being done: what has had to come up and go down has done both; what has to go up before going down will have to wait until tomorrow…

Tomorrow.

I started off the day by prising myself into the still damp and sticky disposable boiler suit because my wife – in spite of all my pleading – wouldn’t let me dispose of it in advance of completion of works.  I donned mask, gloves and head torch (the attic does have electric lights which somehow appear to make it darker) and, with a song in my heart, launched into the day’s labours.  Dare I say it went reasonably well.  I fought the stilts into place, laid down 80 square metres of insulation which, despite the ‘all-surfaces body covering’ offered by my workwear, has left me itching and covered in the kind of rash that normally accompanies dropping a tenner in a nettle patch, and screwed the floorboards – which, amazingly, appear to be relatively solid – to the stilts.  I have walked across them with little fear – although I certainly wouldn’t risk tap-dancing on them.  We will store suitcases up there and the empty boxes that we keep in case we can ever think of anything to put in them.  Anyone even faintly familiar with roof spaces will know that despite the original bungalow being a ten by eight metre oblong, I was not able to lay any more than two feet per roll without cutting around roof trusses, various pipes, TV aerials, long abandoned electrical works and disconnected water tanks, but I got there in time.  I even managed to fit some ventilation widgets without destroying the roof.  I am a happy man and ready for the winter.  Bring it on.  I am fully up to British Standard – until the government changes it, at which point I will tell my wife not to bother buying me another bloody boiler suit.  Buy us both a nice thick cardigan to keep us warm instead, because I’m not going up there again!