That Guy Fae the Corries by Ronnie Browne

Author:Ronnie Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd
Published: 2015-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

The extension was certainly dragging its heels and it was October 1975 before we received a price to line the pool walls with mosaic tiles for a whopping £2,000.

At the same time we were offered more of the outbuildings surrounding our property. We thought this would be a wise buy, reasoning that, if somebody else bought and developed them, it might be detrimental to the value of our property. This meant finding more money, but that problem could be overcome by selling the basement flat at Henderson Row, which we still owned and had rented to my brother Ian, now working for our fledgling Pan-Audio record business. We accepted an offer for the flat of £7,500 on November 19th.

In a meeting with Stan we learned that the heating for the pool room would come in at £2,500 and extra money would be needed for the wooden slatted ceiling. The result of wanting everything of top quality is that it all costs more. The projected cost of the whole extension was now £40,000, and rising.

Thankfully, on the morning of November 28th a surveyor from Bernard Thorpe, representing Eagle Star, visited and said that he was recommending that their £25,000 be paid the following week, even though work had still to be done. Work most certainly did still have to be done; it was December 21st before the coping stones were placed around the area of the pool. On the same day Stan suggested he could get us beautiful 9” by 2” tongued and grooved hardwood parquet tiles from a derelict mill in Selkirk to line the billiard room floor.

In early New Year the plasterers were still working on the billiard room when the joiners came to measure for an extra beam which was required on the outside. All of this contributed to a favourable inspection by my friendly bank manager, Ian Meldrum from the Hawick branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Ostensibly coming to view the work he also looked at the outbuildings which we were now considering buying. He was enthusiastic, saying he thought they were worth at least £10,000 and we should consider their purchase.

Pat and I were becoming more and more depressed. Work went on constantly with the daily presence of plasterers, joiners, tilers, electricians and heating engineers. On top of all of that we had bought the parquet flooring Stan had found in Selkirk, but it did not come without problems, the trouble being that it was still on the floor of the mill.

On this we worked as a family. I would pick up the children from school and go to the mill where we would prise the tiles from where they had been anchored to the floor with tar. They were filthy with years of grime but we discovered that soap and water was the simple solution, and a blow-torch took off the tar. After many visits we finally got them all back to the house and I began to lay them on the floor of the billiard-room.

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