How The Stairwell Didn't Get Papered

[poliphilo]

Carl was up most of the night. Evil car thieves had been racing their ill-gotten gains up and down his street before crashing it into some blameless citizen's pride and joy. Carl rang the police, then foolishly sat up waiting for them to show. They didn't.

So this morning he turned up here proposing to paper the stair-well. He positioned the ladder on a narrow ledge over the abyss. It creaked and bent under his weight. Then he asked me to stand under it and help him measure the paper. Look, I've got too good an imagination; ladders scare me anyway- and all I could think of was what it would feel like to be skewered by a jagged shard of metal ladder with Carl's bulk behind it.

We sent him home. 

He'll come back the week after next with his son-in-law. The son -in-law will hold the ladder. And Carl will (hopefully) have had a proper night's sleep. It won't be any safer in real terms but perhaps it will seem so.  At least I'll be able to keep well out of the way.

Comments

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

I can empathize 100% and then some. Our home has been a building site for a year. The stairwell to our basement is in ruins as we wait for our own particular Carl to have a free weekend or ten to dedicate to the redoing of it. The kitchen has unfinished bits and pieces of tiling and carpentry. The garden walks and the drive are crunched disasters where the big machinery crushed them during the renovating.(Outside work *might* be done in the spring.) Not one single room has all its paint.

Oh...and the ceiling leaks over the front door due to faulty masonry above it.

You have all my most heartfelt sym/empathy.

I take it Carl is a rather hefty gentleman?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Carl is a little on the large side....

He's also very good at what he does and takes infinite pains. At an early stage of the proceedings he took up a floor he'd three quarters laid and started again from scratch because he wasn't entirely satisfied with the way the boards aligned with the walls of this lovably irregular old house.