Payback time

Life inside a DIY rabbithole.

Hello friends,

I’m taking a break from the usual (= ways to think differently about not-knowing). This is because I have been sucked into a DIY rabbithole as cosmic payback for having hung out with sea turtles. Regular programming will return soon, no fear, but for now listen to my tale of woe.

“Sea turtles?”, you ask. Yes. It was bananas. Completely unexpectedly moving.

At the beginning of February, I went to Costa Rica, to a remarkable private conservation project in Guanacaste province. It is not far from the Área de Conservación Guanacaste World Heritage Site, which I didn’t get to visit this trip. My long-standing connection with ACG is why there is a parasitic wasp (genus Lytopylus) named after me whose notauli which are well-impressed. But that is a story for another time.

The Pacific, from a turtle nesting beach in Guanacaste.

So: I was down on the beach in Guanacaste near midnight, away from the main buildings. I saw a spray of sand erupt from what seemed like nowhere, then spotted someone sitting in the gloom under a nearby shrub. He waved me over as another spray of sand shot out.

It was a leatherback sea turtle in a shallow sand pit. She was in a trance, excavating her nest in a slowly deepening counterclockwise circle. We watched for several hours until she stopped circling and the bluish gleam of eggs appeared and grew in the moonlight. Occasionally we got up to ferry lost hatchlings from a different nest to the edge of the sea in breadbaskets. Did I mention it was bananas?

A hatchling in a breadbasket.

And so we come to the horror. Because I would be away for a few weeks, I finally had people come in with scaffolding to sand and paint the 3.5m ceiling, then remove the crappy fake wood floor. A quick job scheduled to finish 4 days before I got back. It goes without saying that the painters finished well behind schedule, so things did not go according to plan.

The floor finally came up after the painters finished, by which time I was already on my way home. The builders sent an ominous message while I was dashing for a short connection in Schiphol: About 75% of the floor was old unglazed terracotta tile — but the rest was poorly mixed, incompetently poured, badly leveled, dusty rough concrete.

When I landed in Marseille and reconnected to the internet, the photos they’d sent downloaded. They were chilling. When I got to the apartment, the builders were cleaning up to leave for the day. We inspected the ruins together. They wore industrial-grade respirators; I coughed discreetly. “It is very dusty, is it not?”

The team, naturally, was already committed to another job. They wouldn’t have time to level the floor and lay new tile. But they would be ravished to lend me for the weekend their elderly but extremely puissant vacuum cleaner literally held together with duct tape and baling wire. They gaily cried words of farewell — “Malheureusement!”, “C’est dommage!”, “Désolé!” — as they skipped down the stairs, bound for a nearby restaurant staffed by a Romanian cook for a taste of sort-of home.

For some days and nights, I paced around piles of dropclothed boxes in a dusty apartment calling up flooring installers. My assiduous research revealed that all of the south of France is redoing their floors to prepare for the Summer Olympics rental bonanza. The soonest anyone would commit to doing this tiny job was in November and they were in anguish at having to quote so absurd a price to do this rush job. This same tiler suggested that it would not be so difficult to do it myself — there being many videos of quality instruction on YouTube.

Actually useful.

That was last week, when the rabbithole yawned open with alarming rapidity. Let us now speed forward in time to the present.

I have laser leveled the floor to discover the maximum elevation difference (appallingly enormous!), taken a cold chisel to the numerous high spots and unreacted patches of sandy screed (sorry downstairs neighbours!), torn off the poorly glued-on, misaligned baseboards and cable channeling, filled all the cracks, fissures, gaps, and chasms that form in carelessly mixed concrete, vacuumed repeatedly, and applied acrylic primer-sealer.

All this was remedial, to properly prepare the ground to receive a new floor surface. Every, say, 10 minutes, I found another reason to shake my fist impotently at the artisans of yore who seemed to have delighted in cutting every imaginable corner of material and execution.

Tomorrow, I will take delivery of many sacks of self-leveling compound, tubs of 2-part water-based floor epoxy, and rolls of perimeter isolation tape. I have a plan of attack which I’m confident will not survive contact with the enemy. So far, the sea turtles were worth it. But by Saturday the depths of my folly or the heights of my handiness will be plain for all to see. (I suppose this counts as not-knowing and productive discomfort.)

Stay tuned.

VT