The floor’s gone out

The floor’s gone out.

I just thought you should know.

I opened the door to the closet and the planks, well they’ve done gone out in places. And I thought, well, that’s not all that bad. A couple of spare hardwood boards for flooring ought to fix that up in a jiffy. Chances were, there might be something salvageable below, I thought.

So I snapped my fingers and Ol’ Gregory — you remember Ol’ Gregory, don’t you? You cannot have forgotten him just because you moved upstairs. It has only been a few months, I cannot imagine your memory is quite as dull as that.

Anyway, Ol’ Gregory peeked around the door and asked, “What do you need, boss?”

“You got that flashlight on ya?”

“Sure thing, boss. I always got me torch,” he said and handed me that small thing that in no way resembled a torch.

And then I went, turned it on and shone that torch through the hardwood remaining and, sure enough, there were some planks remaining below. Only, there seemed to be a bigger problem that those on the upstairs should consider.

You see, below the floor, where I expected to see dirt or stone… Well, I hate to inform, but there were another hardwood floor below where no hardware floor had any right to exist.

I’m nothing but adaptable, though, as you well know and did not let that bother me overmuch. I thought, hell, I’ll just go get some of that floor to repair this floor and no one will ever be the wiser.

That’s probably how that renegade floor came about in the first place.

Only, as I looked for a place to drop down for me salvage operation, I took note that that hardwood floor below… well, it was missing some floor itself and there were scant places safe to jump down to, rope and harness or no.

“Oh dear,” said Ol’ Gregory, which was not nearly as helpful as he might have thought. I’d already said it to meself in me head, so his were wasted words.

And I then shone his torch around the room below and saw another floor between the planking. And, lordy be… That was missing some flooring as well. And I got so I was seeing that there were a number of floors below that were missing enough parts to question whether they still deserved to be called floors at all and I had a hard time guessing just how far the broken floors might go.

I just thought you should know: the floor’s gone out and I’m not sure which way we show go with our fixing of it. I think you folks upstairs should come on down and maybe see what is down that hole.