Real life | 16 May 2019

‘When you are in a hole stop digging. Have you never heard that?’ I asked the builder boyfriend, as he slammed his spade into a pile of earth.

I came home to find him in the cellar finishing some unfinished business. The last time we gave it a go — by which I mean gave ‘us’ a go — he set about renovating the house from the bottom up, attempting to remove all the loose earth in the basement. He filled sack after sack, hauling it out in camel tubs, until I was begging him to please do anything else. In the end, I kicked up such a hullabaloo that he was forced to fit me a bathroom.

But he remained somewhat obsessed with the lower-ground-floor level and every time he thought I wasn’t looking he would sneak back down there and start burrowing his way through the earth again, like a demented mole.

The problem is, whoever built this house didn’t remove the earth when they were putting in the footings, so instead of a complete basement area running beneath the upper ground floor what we have is half a lower ground floor at the garden level and half a basement full of loose earth, as well as 100-year-old bricks and rubble.

When we first moved in, the builder became obsessed with dealing with it and, stripped to his waist, began shovelling it into bags, stopping only to ruminate on the various artefacts he was turning up such as old clay pipes that the original builders had smoked as they were working, and slices of old plates and assorted pottery items.

Once I had my bathroom, I nicknamed him Time Team and let him get on with it. After a while the space made a nice tack room and tool store.