Colm O'Regan: A dirty weekend with my wife, cleaning out the attic

“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept...for there were no more worlds to conquer.” I know how Alexander The Great felt.

To be clear, I haven’t just led a host of thousands of bristling swordsmen and lumbering war elephants across Persia to conquer the Hindu Kush.

It’s just that we finally sorted out the attic.

For years I thought that having an attic that was up in a heap was just something that was a constant about life, like National Debt or moles.

But last week we got it sorted. The insulation people were coming and rather selfishly, they wanted US to sort the attic FIRST. I thought they were much better placed to do it as they wouldn’t be distracted for ages by a birthday card from 2004. But no dice. You just can’t get the help these days. And we didn’t find the dice.

We were chasing that sweet sweet BER rating. The Points Race for adults. We’d got some work done before which got us up from Pass House (D) to Honours House (C) but it was a C3 and we wouldn’t have the points for the new college course in Climate Change.

So that required an empty attic. How do you empty an attic in a small house? How do you shut down the island of Manhattan?

The answer of course is to remove children from the equation. Sent to their grandparents for the weekend and with the house to ourselves, me and my wife exchanged mischievous glances. 

A dirty weekend was in store. Like rabbits we were. If rabbits were trained to do nothing except go up and down a Styra and sort a box of IKEA shrapnel. 

At first, the attic was swiftly emptied.

In taking up the old chipboard floor, I was regretting the waste: look at us here trying to reduce waste but throwing out this grand floor.

Step forward Ireland’s amazing community of People Who Need That Very Thing, Funny You Should Mention It.

I put ‘Old Floor Sections’ up on Adverts. Reader: THEY WERE GONE IN AN HOUR. A woman with a van. No messing. Did you ever get high with no drugs at all? That feeling.

Then we got overconfident. Things were going too well. We started to sort the stuff. And got bogged down in memories.

My wife asked, “Did you paint these Colm?” We’ve found paintings from when I was nine. Oh, the earnestness. There was one of a zoo. But get this: All the exhibits in the zoo are HUMANS and the tourists were ANIMALS! I had called the painting. “HOW DOES IT FEEL?” I gnawed my own jaw off with the cringe.

But with the imminent return of the children, we snapped out of it. We even started throwing some stuff away, after rigorous tribunals about whether anyone would take it.

The insulation people insulated and floored the attic the following day. Now it has a smaller amount of stuff, we can actually see the floor they put in.

 The man from the SEAI said we’ll hardly get above a C1 though. Apparently, in older houses, the heat is going out through the floor. What heat? We’ve hardly had it on. Shur, we’re practically a carbon sink at this stage. I’ve become an insulation bore. If the temperature plunges to minus-a-lot I’ll still be there dressed in hot water bottles swearing everything is fine.

But to get the A, basically, the house pretty much needs to be sheltering corncrakes. It’s a pity. I think if any house would suit me it’d be a passive house.

Still, now the attic is done. There are no worlds left to conquer.

Aha! Duplicate files scattered on numerous external hard drives: you’re next.