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.

Cold Chisel in Chewed Magna

I have pets in the house. No, the giant bird eating spider hasn’t come back. Nor indeed have I seen Lizzie – our Blue Tongue lizard – in weeks. Seeing the amount of rain, the poor blighter has probably downed.
Instead termites are becoming the terror, as I slowly find more wood that they have chewed on.

They seem to love the blue gum that the interior weatherboards are made out of, but are careful, pernickety eaters. They nibble through the interior of the boards, leaving the outside paint pretty much untouched. I had no idea they were there until I leaned on the wall and it just folded under me. The outside weatherboards have fared better, with only intermittent nibbling. Meanwhile the frame of the building, made out of good solid Tasmanian Oak, remains untouched. At least all the tin over my head isn’t going to collapse (Note to Ed: check this).

Alas all the new pine weatherboards that were put in just 20 years ago areas hollow as a demented chocolate santa, and are only fit for firewood.

That still leaves me with the problem of how to remove the weatherboards though, because they are carefully made with a tongue and grove so that the one above slots into the space of the one below, making a very strong structure that alas, means it’s impossible to remove a board without chopping it into little bits. Which, trust me, is very tempting. The termites have done that for the ones I want to scrap, but how do I replace them?

The answer, like with hedgehogs, is very carefully.

Once again, going back to the main theme of the blog – at least it was, many moons ago – of how to do something, I’ve worked out a technique. To lever out the boards I’ve found that running a cold chisel up its tongue will help it split neatly when I get it out, and then using that chisel on one side and a huge metre long crowbar on the other to lever it out means I can get at about half the boards without them turning into matchwood.

Then, to put  in a new, replacement  weatherboard in the gaping hole, the technique involves removing about half the height of the inner wall of the groove side, and sloping it at 45 degrees. Then, taking the tongue and doing the same with that, angling it at 45 degrees. Push the top one in place, lift it up, and it makes a reassuring click, and slots into place, without any visible sign that I’ve moved it.

At least, that is the theory, but I’ve now developed a look of horror at all the walls that need work. Some of them at least are not touched by termites – all they need is a bit of insulation. For those, I’m tempted to just slap some paint around and be done with it.

Sometimes I feel like I'm swimming uphill against the grain.

In the hair tonight

Or, how to get TV reception in Australia, part 2.
I now have my “remote and rural” antenna. This huge 12 feet long bendy monster can, apparently, pick up the slightest whisper in the air and turn it into clear precise picture. What it isn’t, however, is complete.

Thankfully it was very cheap, and comes in pleasant shades of blue and orange. Cheap, because it came out of the back of a skip, and was recycled on the notice board at work. I was delighted, until I tried to get it into the car.
As always, you can lead a gift horse to water but you can't look him in the mouth.
 After about half an hour of swearing, I bent the arms in, and poked the nose through the drivers window, running over the top of my hair. I then preceded to get some very interesting looks from drivers as I went up the M2, giving everyone the impression that I was just driving in the same general direction as half a ton of aluminium, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
After a fair amount of amateur blacksmithery, hammering the various arms straight again, it works a charm, and can even pick up this quaint VHF stuff, despite the coming down like gangbusters.
It will however lurk out of sight in case it scares the horses, and causes passing aircraft to be diverted. I know the sight of such a vast aerial array scares me.
Still, I can now receive the ABC, and in the ensuing celebration, the beer flowed like wine.

The revenge of the missing gardener

For the past couple of months I’ve been carefully tending a small patch of ground by the east wing door. It was obviously a gravel car park when this place was a pizza restaurant, and the quality of the ground hasn’t changed much since. Stones, rocks, small odd shaped pieces of glass that turn out to be sections of bottles from the 1820s (well, this is an old pub after all) and even some old colonial era coins. However, I’ve dug it, mulched it, raked it, and a couple of months back I had a semi pristine flowerbed.
Back in blighty if you want vivid expansive acres of wildflowers, the classic process is to sow seed trays with flower seeds and raise them from scratch, however, here’s a curious thing. You can’t buy seed trays in Australia. I must have visited every garden centre known to man, and all of them shake their head. Not in Australia... it’s so warm, you just plant your seeds straight in the ground.
So, that’s what I’ve done.
I’ve spent the best part of two months carefully tending this most delicate of gardens, watering the delicate seedlings, and raising them until, after eight weeks, some were a good six inches high. And I did have a vast array of swan River Daisies, Marigolds, Nasturtiums, Flox, and Poppies. Except when I got home this evening, the cupboard was bare. For those of us blessed with the gift of sight, it was woeful to behold. The scorched earth had little left, except that is for my remaining line of sunflowers. But that’s about it.
What could cause such devastation? Slugs? Snails? Some weird Australian aphid? Killer locusts? Nope... The phantom gardener had struck.
“What about my seedlings?” “There were none – just a few weeds” “They were wildflowers” “Exactly – just weeds. Plants in the wrong place” “I think you’ll find I was planting them in exactly the right plants – just not necessarily in the right order.”
Someone's going to hang from the yardstick for this.