Our man from Wales came to collect the range. He arrived after a 5 hour drive from Rithin, and after having lugged his son’s university clobber up three flights of stairs into a Kings College bedroom, so removing a cast iron Victorian range from it’s 100-year position in our old shack was a walk in the park.
I knew he must be an enthusiast for Victorian ranges when he first saw it he called in the “Beasty” – like a beetle lover seeing a prized specimen for the first time. His son, who joined him on this expedition, said they’d developed rather an obsession for such things and tracked them when they appeared on the internet.
I suspected they wanted to extract it, renovate it and then sell it for an enormous profit, but it seemed that this exercise was for their own personal benefit and he admitted to already having two of them in their own house. Quite what they do with them I’m not sure – but he did say they liked to get “snowed in” and put on a nice rice-pudding.
Our range had the dubious honour of being a rather “late design” which meant a novel fender around the firebox and a modular design which let’s you choose whether to have the firebox on the left or right and an option to use it as a water heater. In fact it turns out the range was part of the original “heating system” for the house and is connected to the strange water tank which I thought was a cistern for the outside lav.
The pair of them made me smile – reminded me of me and my dad doing similar things – especially carrying my junk up three flights of stairs each time I turned up to college.
Two hours later the poor man looks like he’s been down a coal mine for that time – as a 100 years of soot had descended upon him and our “kitchen” floor. The range is in pieces, in separate green bags and there are a dozen broken bricks lying around on the floor.
I’m hopeful that the builders (who start in just a couple of weeks… delayed again) will be able to clear up the mess – they’ll be removing a lot of bricks from there anyway.
And so our house is range-less for the first time ever. It feels both constructive (getting our plans to modernise underway) as well as de-structive (changing the house from how it was). But on balance, it’s a good thing that this wonderful old bit of cast-iron has a good home to go to (not ours) and that we can get on with the process of making a contempory and exciting place to live out of this old shed.
Your man has promised to send a photo when it’s all in good working order – I look forward to it. And hopefully so will our house be, by then.