Thanks Dad…

Oh dear, my poor chimney. It’s been deteriorating for a while now but the ice and wind this winter finally finished it off. Every weekend I’ve been finding large and larger chunks of mortar on the gravel in front of the cottage. And then, a couple of weeks ago there was a huge thump on kitchen roof as something clattered down in the gale force winds. Of course I had to take a look and there it was; a chunk of mortar almost the size on a small car. Something had to be done before either more serious damage was caused or the chimney fell down altogether.

Calling my friendly local builder I was a little surprised to find that the repair was going to cost me fourteen hundred quid (with scaffolding and the removal of all rubble but exclusive of VAT). Even with scaffolding (and of course the rubble removal) fourteen hundred quid for a bit of cement seemed a little steep so, as I do in times of direst trouble, I turned to my dad for advice.

My dad comes from that time when you did everything yourself. Not only did you clean your car by hand, but you serviced it yourself and if it broke down then you repaired it yourself. I even remember (aged 8) helping my dad change the gearbox of his old Cortina at night, by torchlight (I was the torch holder).

Yes’ I think it would be fair to say that my dad is one of those men who ‘has a go’. I think that he learnt it from his dad who grew his own vegetables, raised his own pigs, shoed his own horse, and built his own steam engine. What was pointing up a chimney compared to that?

‘There’s no need to call someone out. You can do that yor’sen.’ My dad would mumble when a neighbour called the glazier to replace a broken pane, or the plumber to fix a leaking tap, or the nuclear engineer to close down the reactor that was about to go… well, nuclear.

I too will have a go at most things (I think I learnt that from my dad) but a combination of my bad back, poor cementing skills, and a not very good head for heights, didn’t exactly have me rushing for my trowel. So as I’ve already said, I rang my dad for advice.

‘There’s no need to call someone out. We can do that our’sen.’ My dad said down the phone line. Really? Yes, we can can’t we. I can’t, but together I believe we can.

So this Saturday at ten prompt my dad, dressed in his overalls, arrived with a boot full of buckets, wire brushes, trowels and levels and we set to work. My ladder system (the one that has four locking sections to make it into a platform or even a ‘L’ platform) was ideal to reach the chimney. All I had to do was rest it on the flat roof of the kitchen and then place the upturned ‘L’ on the flat roofs of the bedroom dormers giving me, with a little moving around of the ladders, 360 degree access.

Our 'setting to' involved my dad mixing the mortar, bucketing it up to me on a rope, and me up on the ladders slapping on the sand and cement. It wasn’t easy and progress was slow. My dad mixed and carried, climbing the ladder again and again, and towards the end helping me with the tricky bit where we needed to nail on the board to get an overhang so that the water would drip away from the stack. I’d never have managed it on my own, definitely not in the time. In fact I probably wouldn’t have started on my own at all and just payed the friendly builder his fourteen hundred quid or even let the stack crumble away to nothing.

It took six hours, two sacks of ready-mix mortar, some PVA, a lot of fiddling about, and a big pinch of determination. I really didn’t like standing on the platform when we did the front edge, but dad was there holding the ladder steady and telling me not to step back.

So, maybe the finish isn’t perfect, the look a little rustic, but it’ll do the job very nicely and it is a very old cottage in the country. Once it’s sealed and painted it’ll look just fine, and at twenty quid for materials it’s a good bit cheaper than getting somebody in.

Fourteen hundred quid. Bah! We did it our’sens didn’t we dad.

Thanks, I’d never have done it without you.