On the level
I discovered something recently.
It really has quite shattered my self perception and made me realise I am not quite as perfect as I had thought.
Well over half a century ago my father and I built the South Wing of The Manor.
It started off with the design which was my father’s job, being a Civil Engineer. He did a brilliant job though with some hindsight [some sixty years later] I might have suggested some slight modifications. Nevertheless the design was done and I set to work.
The work was divided according to abilities. He was the brains who supervised and I was the brawn that did the rough heavy stuff. Over the course of the build I got somewhat tired of lugging concrete blocks around and pushing barrow-loads of cement but I did have a pride in my work. Those blocks were laid to perfection. They were straight, level, perfectly aligned and perfectly vertical. In fact we never bothered plastering some of the walls and just painted the blockwork.
I paid equal attention to laying the floor joists and floorboards. Again, all were perfectly level. It was a work of sheer genius.
To this day there have been no problems. I grant that we had some problems with parts of the roof but that was down more to wear and tear rather than the construction. Not one settlement crack has ever appeared.
But back to my discovery…..
If Penny pees in the kitchen, the flood gently flows to the north. If she pees in the lobby the flow is to the west. The floors aren’t perfectly level!
I’m gutted.
I’m not pure perfection after all.
In well over half century things settle a bit (maybe even several bits).
You may have to settle for perfection and just drop the pure part.
It’s the Warble Gloaming. The Earth has warmed, therefore expanded and the tectonics has altered the distribution of masses (strictly secular y’know) therefore the gravity under your house.
Can I get a grant, pretty please because I found a new bad effect of the Warble Glozming © Grampa.
I concede, that’s way better than my explanation.
Be thankful – If it was perfectly level you’d now be sitting in a great big puddle of piss!
That is true. I must be thankful for small mercies?
I got a new kitchen put into my mum’s house back in the summer and thought quarry tiles would be nice for the floor. Something I thought would be done quickly took days and days because the builder used a spirit level to ensure every tile was absolute flat. There was an inordinate amount of the tiling cement used for the kitchen floor of a house where nothing else is straight.
Keep that man’s phone number somewhere safe, there’s a man who looked around and rather than “it’ll do sure the rest of it’s crooked ” said “Feck it, well my bit will be right anyway ”. A very rare quality these days.
Do you want a loan of Penny to test it?
The house we live in was built after a V1 bomb flattened the old place, so ‘The Turrets’ was built in the early fifties, roughly on the same site.
The whole central area settled by about half an inch, probably as soon as it was built, so when we moved in 35 years ago, none of the doors fitted, the decs were hideous, (the original battleship grey etc.), the stairs were wonky and there were cracks around every ceiling! In fact, there’s hardly a level surface or vertical section anywhere!
New building materials were quite scarce then, so there’s a lot of second-hand timber in the roof, which is pretty sparse, but luckily, it all still seems to work…
Wonky walls add character, though they are a right bitch to wallpaper. I actually like them. One of my favourite hotels is an ancient building and all the floors are off kilter which means staggering everywhere even when sober.
A lot of comments blaming subsidence? Dad, when he was designing, specified foundations for a two floor building which only has one floor. The old house was built of granite on granite a couple of hundred years ago. There isn’t a single sign of subsidence anywhere in the old or new!