Geriatric Park: Invasion of the Lino Sores

I spent a few hours at my Grandmother’s house on Saturday morning/afternoon. She’d ordered some new lino for her kitchen floor and I was tasked not only with collecting it from the supplier, but also with laying it. Now I’m reasonably competent with most things DIY, in fact I’ve undertaken and successfully completed several projects at home which would seem to be far more difficult and complex than laying a piece of lino.

For example, I installed a radiator in our smallest bedroom, a task which only a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have dreamt of undertaking. It was a project which wasn’t without its problems, but the problems were ironically nothing to do with leaking connections. What actually happened was that I accidentally cut into a pipe which was next to the one which I was supposed to be cutting, but didn’t discover this fact until I had installed the radiator and turned the mains water back on. I eventually repaired the damage and the room has been toasty warm ever since. In the same bedroom I also built a wardrobe on top of the box in the corner of the room which encompasses the head room of the staircase below. The object of the exercise was to clad the wardrobe with plasterboard so that when the room was eventually re-plastered, the wardrobe would look as if it had always been there, and it would also disguise the ugly staircase intrusion. It worked a treat, and I’m extremely proud of it, though I was slightly embarrassed when the plasterer commented that he’d never seen anything with so many screws holding it together. Looking back on it I probably did over compensate somewhat on the screw front, but at least I’m comfortable in the thought that should Lower Morden ever be subject to a ferocious earthquake, my bullet-proof wardrobe would remain proudly intact, even if the house crumbles around it. The fact that this monstrosity appears to have been in situ since the house was built is also remarkable when you consider that the walls in our house are wavier than the Queen’s hand at a particularly busy public function, and my attempts at trying to get the whole thing straight and true was an almost impossible task, though any errors on my part were cleverly and skilfully concealed by the plasterer.

I also constructed an integral shower cubicle in the bathroom, as well as installing the shower tray and door, and plumbed in the heated towel rail. The process of demolishing the wall between the toilet and bathroom necessitated the original bathroom door to be removed and boarded over, but the particular layout upstairs also meant that we would have to remove and rebuild some sections of wall. We also had to knock down the walls of the old airing cupboard so that I could install the necessary pipe work for the new towel radiator, so in essence I had to rebuild several sections of wall whilst also constructing the shower cubicle along the way. On his arrival to re-render the bathroom walls ready for tiling, the plasterer once again commended me on my sturdy construction of the stud walls, using his now oft-used phrase when describing my handiwork of ‘Well, that’s not going anywhere, is it?’

Anyway, this article was not conceived as a self-congratulatory piece about my apparent prowess at DIY, it’s actually supposed to be a report on my utter failure at laying lino. The term ‘utter failure’ is perhaps a little unfair, as the result isn’t actually as bad as all that, but the point is that my usual confidence when commencing a DIY project seemed to disappear out of the window like some airborne version of Samson’s strength when his hair was chopped off. To brand it a failure would also be unfair to my mum, who happened to be on one of her fleeting visits from Staffordshire (on this occasion to visit my uncle in hospital - who, incidentally, is making a remarkable recovery since his hit-and-run RTA in January) and was staying with my grandmother. As she had some time to kill before visiting hours commenced at the hospital, she decided to give me a hand with the lino, and I’m eternally grateful that she did. Where my usual methodical and mathematical approach to this kind of project had momentarily left me, it was my mum who took charge of the initial problem of where the hell to start with trying to get this seemingly football pitch sized piece of lino into a tiny and haphazardly shaped kitchen.

My grandmother’s flat is actually the ground floor of an Edwardian terraced house, and what would normally be the kitchen in such a house is in fact her bedroom, and the ‘pantry’ as it was is now split into a bathroom and kitchen. This arrangement makes the kitchen a compact 6’6" by 7’6", and the laying of the lino was also complicated by the fact that the kitchen units are made up of bits and bobs assembled over the years by my late grandfather, and so what would in normal circumstances be a nice square area of floor is actually more like the profile of the London Underground map. However, after removing the freestanding items such as the fridge freezer and tiny kitchen table, we set to work on cutting an over-sized rough approximation of the shape of the floor so we could at least place the lino on the kitchen floor and then start worrying about trimming it to fit. Unfortunately, my grandmother decided that this was a good time to prepare her lunch, and so we had to halt our progress temporarily whilst she heated some soup in a saucepan on the cooker. This isn’t because she didn’t know what was going on or has lost her marbles in any way, it’s simply because she’s a very determined lady. She may well be 89 this year but she’s still got all her faculties, including her insistence that she will do things exactly when she wants to regardless of what anyone else may think.

After she’d disappeared into the dining room to have her lunch, my mum and I set to work once more. It was, I have to say, a somewhat surreal experience to be down on my hands and knees with my mum, laying lino on a Saturday afternoon. My mum is fairly fit and healthy, but is still pushing 60 and so it was with a mixture of pride and gratitude that I sat there with my Stanley knife at the ready contemplating the situation.

The most difficult aspect of trying to trim the lino to fit snugly is where on earth to start the process. My mum was far more confident that I was, and suggested that we cut all the necessary slots out first to go round all the fixed units. This I started to do, even though my incisions into the precious lino were as confident and butterfly-inducing as if I were about to carry out a triple heart by-pass operation with a similar level of training. It was alright once I got going; soon I was trimming away as if I’d been doing it for years, but it was the initial apprehension of making a fundamental error and thus rendering the lino as scrap that was the most difficult hurdle to overcome. As we progressed onto the larger-scale areas of trimming to fit perfectly along straight lengths adjacent to kitchen units and walls, my mum commented that I had much more guts than she would if she were making these important cuts that would still be on full view when everything was put back into the kitchen. Little did she know that I wasn’t being brave at all, I was simply facing up to the fact that it was no good fannying about worrying about getting it perfect, it just had to be done. My grandmother wasn’t helping by the fact that she kept coming into the kitchen to see how we were getting on and consequently getting in the way. Though I would never shout at my grandmother, this did ruffle my mum’s feathers somewhat and she repeatedly sent my grandmother scurrying back into the living room with a few sharp comments.

We eventually finished laying and trimming the lino, and the result was what I would now describe as ‘adequate’. It was certainly an improvement on the previous lino which had been there for at least 20 years, and as my grandmother would be the one who would see it the most and her eyesight isn’t what it used to be, I was resigned to the fact that it didn’t matter too much if there were few gaps here and there. The most amusing moment was to come after we had reassembled the kitchen furniture, and my grandmother put an off-cut of carpet down on the lino which she had previously had on the hallway carpet on the other side of the kitchen door. My mum immediately told her that she couldn’t possibly have it on the new lino as it was very slippery and thus dangerous to someone of her age, but my grandmother insisted that she have it there so that she could wipe her feet before going into the hallway and thus not ruining the hallway carpet. In her increasing frustration my mum demonstrated to my grandmother by putting her foot on the sliver of carpet and sliding it about on the lino, and explaining to her that since my uncle was still in hospital and my aunt didn’t drive, there was nobody who would be able to come to her rescue during the day should she fall over. She then showed my grandmother that the piece of carpet could quite easily go back in the hall just the other side of the door, and she could still wipe her feet on it before stepping onto the hallway carpet. My grandmother then replied in all seriousness, and in her own increasing frustration, that the piece of carpet wouldn’t stay put on top of the hallway carpet because it had worn underneath, a statement which produced much laughter from me when I heard it from the dining room.

After all this, my grandmother was ecstatic at the sight of her new lino after several weeks of walking about on a bare concrete floor, in fact to the point where she started to dance around on it. This was followed by a swift steadying of her jumping form by my mum for fear of a trip to casualty before I’d even cleared all the tools away. We all celebrated with a cup of strong tea and a delicious prosciuto sandwich, a fact which shows some of the advantages of having an Italian grandmother.