I was up at my usual stupid-in-the-dark time this morning to feed the ravenous kitties. While dishing the food out, I noticed I had an email from Bessie sent at 1:05am with an expletive in the subject line, and the text:

I know you are asleep and won’t see this till morning but my phone has fallen through the floor and I have no idea what to do. It was charging on my bed and it fell off and I went to pick it up and it unplugged from the charger and fell between the hole and the wall and the floor which I didn’t know was there, I am freaking out and don’t know what to do!! WAKE ME UP WHEN YOU READ THIS!!

As instructed, I woke her. She repeated that her phone had fallen through the floor.

I was pretty sure that we didn’t have any holes in the floor, so asked if possibly she’d had a little too much wine with dinner at Joan’s birthday celebrations last night. She was convinced that it was under the floor because she’d heard an under-floor buzzing and she’d moved the bed and couldn’t locate it &etc.

I told her we’d work it out when we arrived at a more sensible hour – and then we all went back to sleep.

After coffee and a run, Don and I pulled up the carpet beneath her bed to discover … a suspiciously bodgy patch on the floor:

yeah, quelle surprise

Clearly this patch was the result of trying to repair some previous water damage. And, hey, hey – moar water damage on the existing floor – argh!

And quite a big, dark gap under the skirting board:

Don got to work with a hammer and chisel to remove the many nails holding bodgy-board down so that he could lever the plank up and access the BessiePhone.

when too many nails are barely enough

And after some time and much sweat, Don lifted the patch to reveal:

And verily, we had very happy, very sleepy phone-owner:

We reassembled the floor and vacuumed and stuffed some cardboard in the holes so that we would not experience this again.

Bloody hell.

Truly, home-ownership is full of horrible discoveries and unexpected expense. I often wish we’d known what to look for before we acquired ThePalace(OfLove).

But hey, the Sydney property bubble means ThePalace is worth way, way much more than we paid – despite the flaws.

We should probably leverage this somehow, but I’m pretty confident we wont.