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Sunday
May 25, 2008

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Hang in there...

               
Combine old masonry walls, no foundation,
ground moisture and spores and you've got
a Czech folk recipe for mushroom invasion.
Like something out of a B horror movie, the
alien creature started small then spread up
the walls behind the couch and bookshelves,
sprouting fleshy appendages as it went. It
creeped me out to go behind the furniture
with a flashlight to have a look at it. Beneath
the carpet the wooden floor began to give way
as the hungry fungus vampirically sucked all the
nutrients out of it, leaving only dust. More animal
than plant, I felt confronted as if by an intelligence.

Hang in there...

Hang in there...





The only recourse was to replace the old wood floor with an impervious combination of styrene and concrete. I didn't relish the task but Josh here motivated me and we got the demo done in just 8 hours, prying and hacking the wood with pick/matic and crowbar then shoveling the loose lightweight stone and dirt--actually very dusty burnt coal which formed the bed of the floor--out the window and into wheelbarrows which we dumped next door to fill in some holes of Jarda my neighbor's driveway and way out back where the ground needed to be leveled anyway. It was a sunny hot day but the stone walls kept the room cool. Luckily, we unearthed a concrete subfloor 15cm down in good condition so the replacement won't cost as much as I'd feared. Thanks, Josh!