Finding meaning in a house renovation and a hedgehog’s visit - Joe Bennett

The hedgehog, as singular of intent as every living creature, passed underneath my dangling feet all unaware.

1988 was a leap year. Of its 366 evenings, I remember one.

That year I bought my first house, a battered bungalow in Lyttelton, high on the hill and a century old. It came with a cat I didn’t want, a leaking roof, an ant-ridden kitchen, a derelict bathroom, a rank garden and I loved it.

On the day I moved in I put an elbow through the plasterboard in the hall, because I could, because I didn’t have to answer to a landlord. Here was the thrill of a property-owning democracy.

A friend said I needed to redo the bathroom. He had a point. The floor was rotten. I said I had neither the skills nor the money. “I’ll help you,” he said, and he stamped a hole in the bathroom floor.

We redid the bathroom. By which I mean that he redid the bathroom while I acted as gopher.

And in the course of a week of gophering, I metamorphosed into that dread beast, the eager DIYer.

In those days, I was a teacher. Every school holiday I worked on the house, moving gradually from the kitchen at the back to my bedroom at the front.

That bedroom had a floor like a ski-slope. I thought of jacking the house level but was told it was too far gone. Jacking would break every window, warp every door frame.

Better to stabilise the building where it was, then cut out the sloping floor and replace it with a horizontal one. The ceiling would still slope down but I was assured no one would notice.

Christmas holiday 1988 I went at it. I was 31 years old and strong. The bedroom floorboards were kauri and I tried to save them but 100 years had dried them to brittle.

I levered them up in shards that went straight to kindling. They revealed a patch of earth that had last been seen by the man who nailed those floorboards down.

It was dried to dust and dotted with Victorian rubbish – a rusted tobacco tin and two beer bottles that I and every other occupant had lived above unknowing. Our Valley of the Kings.

The simplicity of the building was laid bare. The house was just perched on the side of the hill.

There were piles at the corners, and two wooden bearers ran from back to front, each supported in the middle by a large rock. Nailed to the bearers was a rack of joists, a yard or so apart like ribs.

On to those joists, the floor had been laid.

All so simple and 100 years effective. But over the years, the piles had rotted away. As they did so the weight of the house had slowly arched the bearers over their supporting rocks. Hence, the sloped floors.

It is the first principle of DIY to clear everything back to solid before starting to rebuild.

So I cut out all the skirtings, all the fittings, all the joists. I scooped out the rotten piles and sank new ones in fresh concrete. And I nailed new bearers in beside the old ones ready to take the new joists, the new floor.

It is the second principle of DIY to take your time, to stop and study the job as you go, to plan the next steps one by one, to think it through, to nut it out.

And at the same time to admire what you have done, the distance come already, the difference already made. It primes the heart with courage.

So if at 9pm or so on Christmas Eve in 1988 you had walked in the front door of my little bungalow in Lyttelton you would have found me sitting in the doorway of my bedroom, my legs dangling over earth that had seen neither rain nor sun for 100 years.

I was drinking beer, admiring my work and thinking what next. Then I sensed movement. (Oh, how attuned we are to movement. For all our houses and our ease and our sophistication, we have the senses that developed in the jungle.)

A hedgehog appeared, nosing under my house, snuffling as it went.

I held my breath and sat as still as stone.

The hedgehog, as singular of intent as every living creature, passed underneath my dangling feet all unaware and crossed the land that I considered mine.

It took its time. And then it wandered on and out of sight. And that’s my one specific certain memory of 1988. You tell me why.