Una bella dilemma – the steps

Call me fussy, but I hate tripping over unexpected steps in houses. One stubbed toe is one stubbed toe too many in my opinion. And it just feels so cobbled together. Steps belong in staircases and floors ought to be flat.

If he wasn’t already dead (of natural causes I assume), I’d like to throttle the eejit who poured cement onto the floor in two rooms of the house. Because of him, after we add tiles we’ll have a 3-5 cm step going into our kitchen and our bathroom. Before you ask “how could you possibly have employed said eejit?”, this all happened before we bought the place. And yes, we did vaguely note the cement as we looked round, but as the tiles are missing in those two rooms, the problem isn’t as obvious as it could be. And it certainly doesn’t look as expensive to fix as it will be.

Our Italian friends smirk at this dilemma, understanding all too well that a contractor working for an absent client will happily throw cement and plaster where it’s not needed in order to claim for the work. Same firm also replastered parts of the house before the pipes and electricity have been embedded into the wall. Beggars belief.

How do you lift a layer of cement? Well, it was all going well at first. Our cheerful builder’s pneumatic drill seemed to be doing the job of lifting just the new cement. Then Concenzo, the geometra, brought us to look underneath. Although the drill wasn’t reaching the terracotta cross-beams that make up the ceilings of the house, the vibration of the drill above had shattered them. Darn.

Concenzo poised the question: continue, and have about six days work per room to completely destroy and replace ceiling/floor, or have an annoying, I’m-going-to-break-your-neck-one-of-these-days step. (Incidentally, most of the work is shovelling away foot-deep rubble after the drill’s done it’s job. Something that Roscoe with his bad back is not thrilled about.)

I haven’t had a puzzler like this since the multiple choice questions of my GCSE chemistry exam. And just like the exam, I’m not convinced either answer is the right one. On one hand, I don’t want to delay the build by two weeks plus, and we won’t see that money back when we come to sell the house. But I really hate steps.

We eventually came to the compromise that the floor of one room would go. When I have fully understood just how much sweat and pain the workers put in, I can decide for the other room.