12

The Loos and Don’ts

Want to know how it feels to be an immigrant? Renovate a house in a different country. Or just hire an electrician. Electricians have a way of making you feel like you have dropped through the space-time continuum of common sense.

In the six years that I have lived in Britain I have managed to delude myself into thinking that my foreignness is a non-issue, that I have seamlessly adapted to British life because, well, why would I have not? Canada and Britain are part of the Commonwealth; everything we were taught at school was built upon the foundation of British history, literature, and culture. Britain was our motherland. Canada had yet to fully develop a sense of nationhood, and so Britain stood as our constitutional cipher, the standard to which we aspired. It is fair to say that a certain generation of Canadians felt pretty much British, assured of a common tradition of values, as well as of language. Of course, there were differences: Britain had charming accents, the Queen, and adorable thatch-roof homes; Canada had mountains, central heating, and we drove on the right side of the road. Like many of my generation, I had Great Britain, its people, and its mighty heritage on a pedestal.

It is not until you actually buy a home in Britain that you understand the stark and deeper differences between these two countries.

Take fixtures and appliances, for instance. In Britain, where the houses are small and narrow, there is no such thing as an integrated stackable washer/dryer. They are MIA. (There is an all-in-one washer/dryer, but they are impractical if you have multiple washing loads to go through, and they are fairly ineffective on the drying front.) In North America, where floor space is usually not a factor, you can buy an integrated stackable washer/dryer. Or rather, you used to be able to buy them: it appears they are made by only one manufacturer nowadays. But why? These are models of economy and space saving, which every home could use.

Then there are the kitchen appliances. In the UK, stoves are huge, with lots of separate ovens, half of which you do not use; whereas refrigerators, which you use constantly, are slim and lack depth, and have drawer-like freezer compartments that are about the size of a package of printer paper. They certainly cannot accommodate a casserole dish.

Shall we move on to the heating system? In the older stock of British homes (which is the majority of housing stock) there are no basements, and therefore no furnaces and hence no duct-directed heating. You must get accustomed to boilers and radiators. I hate them. They are clumsy and obtrusive, but there is no way to avoid them unless you want to shell out squillions to have your basement dug out for ductwork. British engineering created robust ductwork in Victorian factories and offices but, strangely, the idea never migrated to the Victorian home.

Heating the Victorian terrace means embracing radiators and boilers, which constitute a home’s central heating system. North American homes are (usually) heated by forced-air gas furnaces that push warm air through a duct system and up through floor vents. In the UK, homes are heated when a boiler (usually gas-fired) heats water and moves it around the house to heat the radiators. In a country where square footage is at a premium and room sizes are teensy, radiators suck up a good three feet of wall space, whereas floor vents take up not more than a foot, and even then, you can place furniture over it and still get hot air. Due to space constraints in British living rooms it is not unusual to find that the sofa has been pushed up against the radiator. Presumably, no one worries about the possibility of their sofa catching fire, nor are they concerned that their sofa is covering the sole source of heat in the room.

I asked about the possibility of installing a duct system in our home but was politely told “This is how we do things over here” and handed a catalogue from which to choose a radiator. Sigh.

If mechanicals are one thing to get used to, there is also the matter of British construction terminology and argot to decode: Job done does not mean the job is completed; it means Okay or I’ve got it sorted. First fix and second fix do not refer to heroin-injection schedules but are akin to the North American version of roughing in and finish. There are others: glazing (windows); skirting boards (baseboards); architrave (door frame or trim); worktops (countertops); gutters (eavestroughs). Then there are the categories of trades that come with their own nomenclature: sparky (electrician); chippy (carpenter); brickie (bricklayer); fitter (kitchen installer); decorator (painter, so not someone you would go to for interior-decorating advice). Haven’t yet come across a nickname for the plumber. And then there is the pithy, oft-said phrase whenever I ask about doing something a certain way: “It’s not done in this country.” It is meant to silence me and put me in my little expat place.

So, to the electrician, or sparky, who uses that exact phrase on me when I ask why I cannot have an electrical socket in the bathroom.

Mark is the guy on this job. He is tall, lean, with close-cropped dark hair, and we like him the moment he bounces into our house to quote for the job. He thinks aloud as he surveys the site, asking questions, considering different options, but not exactly wanting a response or input.

He stares down at the floor in our hall for a few minutes, and then drops to his knees and startles us by ripping up a couple of the floorboards. I feel surprisingly protective of the house, as if some guy were sneaking a peak under its skirt.

It is the first time I have seen what lurks beneath the floorboards in an English home. It is not pretty. Under the boards on the ground floor there is no subfloor, just dirt, bare brick, and post and beam foundations, along with entrails of wiring and piping, bits of builders’ debris, and garbage thrown in for good measure. There is no poured-concrete foundation; and certainly no room for a cellar, let alone a full basement. The space is not remotely finished—it looks like it could have been dug yesterday. I cannot say I feel entirely comfortable knowing that not much more than a foot and a half of brick footings and some timber planks are all that hold up our home.

Mark stretches on all fours across the opening, peers into the void, then springs back up. He stamps the floorboard back into place and stands with his hands on his hips, staring at his feet.

“Right. Upstairs.” And off he bounds up the steps, two at a time. We rush after him.

In the master bedroom, he rips up another floorboard. This time we all fall on our knees to observe the guts. It is similar to downstairs minus the brick foundation and dirt. Instead, there are thick timber joists separated by lath and tarpaper-lined troughs filled with all manner of junk: the necessary wiring and plumbing pipes threaded alongside or through the joists; the dust, and evidence of previous work—discarded nails, screws, bolts, wire cuttings, snap-off blades, a Subway wrapper, paper coffee cups.

“What a mess,” I say by way of apology to Mark.

“It’s normal,” he says, and shrugs. “Everyone [he means all the trades] tosses in their crap.”

I am horrified. I do not like the idea of sleeping an inch away from a trough filled with garbage along with a heap of dust and dirt. I do not want the clutter from someone else’s past under my floorboards. Is this what it is like throughout the house? In everyone’s house?

“Is there a contraption that can clear out all this debris, like a big industrial vacuum cleaner?”

He looks at me as if I have just said something that is either ridiculous or brilliant.

“Nothing I’ve heard of. Besides, it’s no big deal. I’ve seen worse. You won’t even notice it.”

But it is a big deal to me. I have allergies, and I am a clean freak. Has James Dyson not thought of this? A device that can suck out the loose matter beneath my floorboards would be a godsend. Just because you cannot see something does not mean it is not there.

Mark hammers the boards back down.

“Right, then. If I’m honest, this house is gonna need a full rewire.”

We nod. We expected as much. And if there is anything you do not scrimp on during a reno, it is the wiring.

Like I said, we like Mark. He has the energy of Tigger, and the deduction skills of Sherlock. But he is a code stickler, which is a good thing in the long run yet a pain when he refuses to consider my request for an electrical outlet in the bathroom.

Here’s the thing: the British are paranoid about electricity and bathrooms.

You cannot have a socket in the bathroom to run your hair dryer or styling tongs, though it is perfectly fine to have a socket to run your shaver. (Why has no one invented a hair dryer or curling iron or hair straightener that runs on the same current as a shaver?) You cannot even have a light switch inside the bathroom. Yet, it is apparently fine to have your light switch inside the kitchen, and to have electrical outlets all over the kitchen countertops close to water—sinks, dishwashers, washing machines, kettles. I can run my hair dryer in the kitchen next to the kitchen sink, but it is against code to run it in a bathroom next to the bathroom sink. Why?

“Please?” I plead with Mark. “I’m North American. We dry our hair in the bathroom.”

He will not discuss it.

Months later, when our main floor WC is fitted in space under the stairs, I assume the light switch will be placed outside the door, as it has been in the upstairs bathroom. But it is not. It is installed inside the WC door. And the reason you can do that is the light switch in this case is on a chain that is attached to a string. Thus, you can have a string to turn on a bathroom light inside a bathroom, but not a switch protected by a wall plate. I cannot see the reason for this.

Mark and I move on to the matter of laundry facilities. Most British homes have their washer and dryer in the kitchen (if there is no separate utility room), either as stand-alone units at the back of the room or integrated into the cabinetry. Recently, the host of a television property program railed against the British habit of locating laundry facilities in the kitchen. It is not an ideal placement for the laundry, but anyone who has schlepped laundry from the top floor to the basement of a North American house and back up again would welcome washing facilities in the kitchen. Apparently, this same TV presenter is not bothered by the main bathroom of a house being located right off the kitchen, which I consider a greater “ick” factor.

Many of the Victorian terrace homes we viewed had bathrooms adjoining the kitchen. In an earlier decade people scurried from the upstairs bedroom down the stairs, through the back of the house to the outdoor privy. (Or used the pot under the bed.) It is a bit of a surprise to learn that the outdoor privy in Britain is still in use. In 2010, about forty thousand homes still had an outdoor loo. Mains drains did not come to parts of Britain until the 1950s, and some areas were without mains drains until the 1990s.

Over time, extensions were built onto the backs of homes to incorporate the privy as a way to bring it “indoors.” As these extensions were updated, better insulated, and equipped with modern fittings and fixtures, the privy was entirely integrated into the home. But it was still on the main floor, off the kitchen.

Moving the bathroom upstairs was something The Husband and I agreed on from the get-go. We are on the same page with that one, even if it means sacrificing a bedroom.

The other very British feature in a house is doors. The British are door crazy. They have doors that open to more doors. No sooner are you in the front door of a home than you are greeted less than three feet away by a second door. The Victorians were (as are the British in general) sticklers for privacy. Their interior doors open in a counterintuitive direction, so that as the door swings open, you do not see the room immediately, which allows the occupant in the room to recover from doing whatever someone in the living room would be doing that you were not supposed to see. Farther along the hall there is a door to the second reception room. And then another door to the kitchen, and more doors, depending on the layout, to the utility room and bathroom. Upstairs, there are the standard door requirements—doors on bedrooms and bathrooms, though again, in the case of the bedroom doors, they open so as not to disturb the occupant.

Doors were useful in Victorian times to shut off the cold from various rooms, to allow heat from fireplaces and radiators to remain in certain rooms and not be wasted in the lesser-used rooms. With the introduction in the 1970s of central heating this multitude of doors rather impeded the flow of heat in the Victorian home, but by then the British were wedded to their doors. In newly built homes, you will still find a ridiculous number of interior doors despite the fact that the British gush about the open-plan living of North American, European, and Asian homes. I guess you have to be British to understand the attachment to doors.

My idea was to remove all the doors except those to the bedrooms and bathrooms. The Husband will have none of it. He likes his doors.

To brighten the long, dark front hall and create a sense of space, I suggest we remove most of the wall between the hall and the second reception room. He does not like this idea, either. I also suggest we convert the window in that room to French doors opening to the side area of our garden. He is okay with that—it adds another door, after all.

I DASH OUT THE FRONT DOOR to buy a dustpan at the corner shop. As I go through our gate, I almost collide with a woman in a niqab.

“Oh, sorry! Good morning,” a bright voice sings out from behind the black. “Gorgeous day, isn’t it?”

“Yes, i-it is,” I stammer. I am not used to conversing with fully veiled people, though I have learned to pretend that it does not bother me. I like observing the range of people’s facial expressions when I speak with them. It is how I recognize people and relate to them. I gain as much by seeing their eyes, the set of their mouth, the condition of their hair, the tilt of their chin, as I do from hearing their words. I gain no such clues about this woman except from her voice, which has a no-nonsense Brit clip and, to my ears, indicates a practical yet chatty type of person.

Here is another stark difference between British residential areas and their North American counterparts: cultural diversity. Residential areas in North America are for the most part homogenous in terms of cultural, social, and racial makeup, where differences are more muted. Not so in Britain. Our street, as with most residential streets, is made up equally of blacks, whites, and all shades in between; of well-to-dos and not-so-well-to-dos; of professionals and students; of retirees and young families; of immigrants and natives; of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Sikhs; of people with brown hair, grey hair, and green hair. There is no sense, really, of anyone’s social situation on this street. The hip dudes are on bikes; their Muslim brothers are in BMWs with tinted windows. It is a truly and visibly diverse neighbourhood, not an assimilated one.

Once we move in, I look forward to exploring it and getting to know our neighbours, like the gal behind the niqab.

Ah, moving in. Will that be in August? It is only May right now, and August seems a long way off, from a May point of view.