AFTER establishing that our dining room floor was indeed a problem which went a bit deeper than bouncing slightly when you walked on it, our team - well duo actually - of builders turned up last week to set to work on it.

“It’s all straightforward stuff,” the builder in chief assured the housemate.

“We just whip the floor up, sort out the joists, build a new frame and put everything back together. Nothing to worry about at all.”

“Will it be finished by next weekend because Liz is cooking dinner for my birthday,” replied the housemate.

“Next weekend? It’ll be done by this weekend,” said the builder in chief with a confidence we knew by past experience with our house, was probably misplaced.

“It’s never that easy,” said the housemate dolefully retreating to a safe part of the house in the hope of finding a seat somewhere among the displaced dining room furniture.

“Getting the flooring up wasn’t too much of an issue,” said the builder in chief (number two) as I hovered in the doorway some time later.

“All we need to do now is….” Quite what his next move was going to be was sadly cut dramatically short as he fell straight through the floor with his next step.

“This could be a bit worse than we expected,” he proclaimed calmly knee deep in floorboards.

“What’s happened?” Wailed the housemate from the other side of the door.

“Nothing much. Just keep watching your film on TV and don’t panic,” I shouted back.

“You might want to come and have a look at this,” said the builder in chief an hour or so later.

“Oh Lord,” I replied, remembering that the last time I builder said that to me the back half of the house fell down.

“That doesn’t look good,” I said peering into the damp depths of the now uncovered space beneath what was left of the floorboards.

“You could say that,” said builder number one.

“That’s the worst floor I’ve ever seen,” added builder number two.

“But don’t worry, we can sort it out,” they added probably sensing my growing concern.

After half an hour or so of puzzled gazing at the floor and lots of ‘we could try this’ and ‘maybe that would work’, I asked “ couldn’t we…as in you…just fill the ruddy hole with sand and cement?”

“Well that’s not strictly the technical term for the process, but yes we could,” replied the builder in chief.

“It would be easier and far more solid and would solve the damp problem,” he added.

An hour later the plan was set.

“It’s not quite as straightforward as I expected,” said the builder in chief.

“We can’t get a ready mix because we’d need to close the road, we can’t have the materials delivered to the front of the house so they’ll have to come to the back and be wheelbarrowed down the garden to be mixed and we’ll have to take the window out and set up a shute to get the concrete into the room…oh and there’s a huge storm coming in…but apart from that it’ll all be fine.”