The Money Pit
Photo: @simmerdownjpg
It took my nan roughly five decades to wreck our three-floor, semi-detached house in Ramsgate. She managed this by employing a series of people she met down the pub to do jobs they weren’t exactly qualified to take on.
She employed a window-cleaner to completely redecorate the house, a task that resulted in him covering all the internal walls with wood panelling in a chaotic mess that honestly looked like the work of a deranged cultist attempting to build some sort of shrine to a dark god. The rooms on the third storey were the worst, as he clearly ran out of wood and ended up hammering random squares and misshapen cut-outs to cover empty gaps. It was like living on the inside of a jigsaw puzzle. I was once interviewed by The Times newspaper for an article called ‘The Geek Gets Even’ where the reporter described the house as a dwelling with ‘creepy wood veneer walls.’ He wasn’t wrong.
In an effort to save even more money, she employed a plumber to do all the internal plumbing, including water tank piping and immersion heater repairs. At one point, this well-meaning but obviously bewildered man built a wooden shelf in the bathroom to hold an immersion tank that looked way too heavy for it. I remember dolefully staring at the thing while frantically turning on all the taps to drain the tank before it plunged through the shelf and proceeded through the kitchen ceiling on its way to the ground. Thankfully, that never happened: it made bath times a bit uncomfortable, though.
Not content with destroying the inside of the house, my nan then covered the outside with ivy, which grew and consumed the entire facade. She then saw a TV show about the damage ivy could do to a property and paid a man she met at the pub to rip it all out, leaving the front of the building in a state that gave people the impression it had been bombed during the war and never fully restored.
She also infamously lost the house in a game of cards at a pub with a local chap who came to the door every day for months afterwards to ask - very politely - if he could move in to occupy the property he’d won. At some point during these visits, my nan managed to persuade him to both abandon his claim on the house and to fix the toilet.
The toilet was a story all on its own. It was, beyond any shadow of a doubt and is to this day, the oddest structure I’ve ever seen. We lived in a linked-semi. For those of you who haven’t heard the term, a linked-semi is a semi-detached house that shares part of a wall with the building next door. In our case, the toilet was a single tiny room that connected our house to the house next door…but on the FIRST floor. This is a three-storey house we’re talking about, so basically if you peered down the alleyway you would see a brick-built room connecting the two houses in the MIDDLE of the building. On a small scale, it was the type of structure you now see when two corporate buildings have a glass walkway suspended between them. Are you picturing that? Great - now imagine it small, ugly and made of bricks. That was our toilet. There was also a hole between two of the floorboards through which I could occasionally talk to the old man next door when he was putting out his rubbish, and I was attempting to use the toilet for something that’s usually not a spectator sport.
This was the 1980s, remember, not 1841. Reading the above passage back and imagining the house, it’s hard to picture Bananarama but relatively easy to picture Oliver Twist.
I miss the old place…
…a lot.
Then I walk past it again - and I don’t miss it…
…a lot.
