Welcome to Our Gracious Abode

Yesterday A. decided it was time to do something about the joists holding up the floor in the dining room. "Do something" as in entirely replace them because they had rotted away to nothing more than powder and there was essentially nothing keeping us from falling through the corner of the dining room and into the old cistern below.

Yes, it is of such exciting events that our lives are made.

So he started by crawling into the cistern in the Pit of Despair, a feat that takes no small amount of athleticism and strength, with a tape measure to see what kind of boards he needed. Except he didn't get any farther than sticking his head into the hole in the wall he was preparing to crawl through. He stopped short right there and announced ominously," Uh oh. There is a very bad smell."

I, being quick on the uptake, knew that meant something had died in the cistern. A long time ago. In fact, my brilliantly quick brain immediately deduced that it was probably the very same something I had been smelling a few weeks ago when I casually commented to A. that something in the dining room smelled.

It should be an indication of how common this is that I made no great effort to find the source of the smell. I figured it was one of the dogs or something. The smell went away after a couple of days and I didn't think about it again. Until yesterday, when A. discovered the decomposing rat in the cistern directly below the dining room. Then it all made sense.

So, step one in fixing the floor joists actually involved disposing of the rotting rat. GROSS.

And then A. climbed into the cistern, where he essentially stayed for about five hours, setting up all his tools in there and sawing, hammering, and nailing together a whole new framework. My job was to act as flunky, fetching all the tools and things he needed and handing them to him through the hole. I also brought his lunch to him down there, as he actually elected to eat his lunch in the cistern rather than try to crawl back out. That should tell you something about the difficulty of accessing the cistern.

Anyway, we can now rest easy knowing we will not plunge into the cistern and land on a dead rat if we step too firmly in the dining room. And really, that's all I need from life.