In which we destroy a vacuum cleaner

FROM THE ARCHIVES

The new vacuum cleaner had clearly been very bad in a past life.

It came out of the box full of hope and enthusiasm, shining with plasticky joy. It took one look around and realised its future would be short and brutal.

FYI: sandblasting the inside of a house makes a significant mess.

The chap doing the blasting was excellent. He worked really hard, pulled long hours, and did a great job. Years and years of horrible black (and white, and yellow) paint has been stripped from all the internal timbers in the house, where it’s reduced to a fine dust which floats around in the air, settles on the walls, sinks into the carpet.

We spent an entire day cleaning up the house after three days of internal sandblasting and we knew we’d be hoovering up sand for weeks if not months1. We got the kitchen looking quite nice, and certainly clean. At least we could make tea.

The hoover started its work in the rear lobby.

Years of spider construction projects were destroyed in moments.

Civilisations were uprooted.

We moved into the main downstairs room, where the new hoover spent a couple of hours working non-stop, and was emptied perhaps twenty times. We had to come back to that carpet over and over and over and over and over again. In the end, months later, we ripped it out and skipped it.

All the carpets on the first floor were cut into strips, rolled up and thrown in the skip. There’s no point trying to save those carpets — newspaper laid under them were dated 1980, and the carpets had clearly had a tough time. Under the carpet were significant carpetty strata, probably going back another 50 years.

We spent the next day sweeping and hoovering the first floor and really did not expect that hoover to see its first birthday.2

The sandblasting

It was the fashion to paint interior beams black in the 1980s. My parents’ house, which had fake beams, had the same problem. My dad solved their problem by simply boarding over the beams because they have higher ceilings; our cottage has low ceilings and anyway, the beams were original so we wanted to keep them.

And so we brought in Chris the sandblaster.

Once he’d finished, the whole place seemed lighter and the ceilings looked higher. I don’t know if we’ll keep all the beams exposed forever, but for now they’re much nicer to look at.

The wall timbers all came up really nicely — and showed us where we’d have to do repairs or replacements due to woodworm or damage.

Eventually, we’ll have to blast the outside too — remove the black paint from the timbers and the white plastic paint from the stonework, which is a terrible thing to do to stonework because it prevents it from breathing. That, in turn, traps water between the paint and stone, and between the stones, and damages the walls.

But, like so many things, that is a job for another time. This stuff doesn’t come cheap.

The sandblasting cost £2,800 altogether, which was a bargain in the sense that we couldn’t (and desperately didn’t want to) do it.

Plus, Chris looked like he belonged on a podracer on Tatooine in his protective gear.

As you read these shenanigans, you’ll discover that we did as much as we could by ourselves (and with help from friends and family) and only got experts in when we feared death or just couldn’t face it.

Remember to thank your vacuum cleaner next time it does a tough job for you. They have feelings too, you know.

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