The Sound of One Hand Slapping

Now this wouldn’t matter if the house was tucked away in some rural idyll. Somewhere where you can hear the tweety birds rustling outside the window. Alas here, the tweety birds would get trampled underfoot but the 40 ton lorries which they didn’t hear because their ears were bleeding thanks to the incessant din of infernal combustion engines roaring past every five seconds.

If you let that sort of thing go on, your bread and butter will be cut right out from under your feet.

In my search for a solution – and a decent night’s sleep – I’ve discovered this stuff. Acoustic insulation. It’s much thicker than normal insulation, with a dense woven mat to keep the noise down.

Sound insulation is very good for radio stations, but not something that is generally considered useful in a domestic house of mid-1800 construction. Which, quite frankly, shows a remarkable lack of foresight. Hence, they didn’t put it in to start with, and as I mentioned last week, pulling the planks off the wall is a huge pain, due to the way they all lock together.

I’ve spent days trying to find a way to get the insulation into the wall, while the thunder rumbles overhead: a noise that is drowned out by the sound of the rain, and the road as it thunders beyond the old well. I did think of wandering around in a thunderstorm with a spiked copper helmet, muttering that Thor is a pillock, and could he keep the noise down, but I realised that might make the neighbours talk about the mildly eccentric Englishman next door.
Part of the problem is that the insulation is thick, spongy, and sticks on the planks as you shove it down. I’ve tried putting some wood in the dark hole (which isn’t a euphemism) as a pusher, but that doesn’t do anything as the insulation is just too spongy. And whenever I put one hand up the wall, to slap the insulation into place, the killer spiders attack. No, really they do.
And now, I’ve come up with a solution. It involves peeling the individual planks off with a chisel, sliding two pieces of cardboard into the hole (otherwise the insulation sticks on the planks) then shoving the insulation up the gap, using a broom handle to push, and a bendy piece of wire to pull, through a drill hole I can then fill in.