Sex & the single gin – The Chav Tavern

Tlleing Tileing Tileing. Is there no end to the land of Tiles?

It’s not as if they are particularly big or complicated to put on the wall. Not the problem is that the walls are wonky, and each tile has to be exactly right in three dimensions, as opposed to the usual two.

Ettamogah Pub, Sydney

Looking back on the walls I’ve previously done, it’s clear that I’m getting better as I go on, even if it is sending me demented.

However this weekend I turned the corner – as it were – and managed to get most of the tiles in for where the bath is going to be, and then made it to the pub for a well earned pint.

Except pubs don’t really do the hills district. There is no cute looking local. Instead, there is just the regular Bull and Bush – or the Chav Tavern, also known as the Etimorgorrah tavern. It’s a classic Australian pub, by which I mean a huge beer bar of a place, selling overpriced burgers, and reaping profits from the pokies.

In most countries morning is what you go into when the beer runs out. In the Australian suburbs, it seems to be state of mind. I’m in mourning for that most rare of things in Australia - a British Pub.

On the busses

Midsummer. Which means – in a normal year – it would be sweltering outside, and far too hot to consider walking into the bathroom. Which of course, not only has no air-con, but also no insulation. However this summer is one of the coolest on record, and wettest too.

Just look at the grass! Its green. At the well! It’s higher than it’s ever been before.

Even the busses are almost tolerable, if you can put up with Hillsbus drivers and their manic driving, plus the way they turn the radio on really loudly to wake everyone up.

Incidentally, I have often wondered when in a muse, why those waiting for a Hills bus outside the QVB in the centre of Sydney queue in a straight line, and then file in an orderly fashion onto the bus when it arrives, while on the opposite side of George Street, those waiting for an STA bus can only be described as a loose rabble, which transforms into a stampede of crazed wildebeest when the bus finally arrives. Is there some unspoken rule whilst waiting for a Hills bus, or are their customers simply more refined?

Is this crazed wildebeest phenomenon gnus to you?

The Little Rince (when a small wash is good enough)

The vanity unit has arrived! And what a miserable job the renovation boys have done of putting it together. Covered in filth, from the taped up box it looks as if someone has opened it, and returned it, and they just sent it to us.

Greasy fingerprints galore, stains on the top, and even the sink hasn’t been glued properly to the underside of the unit, so water just slops out over the rim of the very small basin and into the vanity.

It also weighs a ton, and is designed not to have any legs, but just to ‘float’ on the wall, looking as if it’s hovering there, and not screwed in by the four hefty bolts I’ve put in the wall, with a good wooden beam for it to sit on too. There could be an earthquake, and the only thing standing would be the vanity.

However, I’ve yet again had to curse both the tiles and Aldi. The tiles for the bathroom were fired at an amazing high temperature, so the aren’t so much glazed, and a solid lump of rock. After trying to drill into them on several occasions, I now don’t bother, and cut them with a diamond saw. That, however, is no good for bolts. So I got out my nice set of new drills for Aldi, and proceeded to ruin a number of them. When drill and tile meet, what comes of worst is always the drill. In one case, it ended up red hot, dripping steel, with nary a dent in the tile.

Time for some new drills.

Grotte on the landscape

Ah, the joy of living in the age of internet shopping.

It means you can buy anything, and only pay what the locals are paying.

Which is a damn good job too, considering that most building materials in Australia are about three times the price of the UK. It is astoundingly expensive to renovate a house over here.

We did look at bathroom fitting in Domayne, but that was just extortionate. Bunnings was almost as expensive. Even the renovation specialist take an arm, leg, and the other leg.

Particularly, as we wanted to get Grotte fitting. Grotte in Australia are the most expensive you can buy. Once I’d reconsidered the economic options – and talked myself down from the ledge – there was only one way to go. You can save a fortune if you buy direct from the supplier, in Germany. Admittedly, they are made in China, so they go half way around the world, only to come back the same way and then some, but the savings are immense. About 65%, including the extra you have to pay for postage. So... total cost for the bathroom, with luxury European fittings. $865. Bargain.

And true to their word, everything arrived perfectly, with a shipping time of under two weeks. Even the suppliers in Australia were quoting a month, so that I think neatly proves that retail in Australia is overpriced with woeful service.

No punds in ten ded.

Asbestos? He as best os with none. (Say it quickly, and it kind of makes sense. I apologise).

There is no asbestos in this ere house. Plenty of termites, rot, and probably a light touch of the death watch beetle. But nasty fibres? None.

Even the experts were confused. They were sure the sheets I had were the nasty grey stuff.

But no, once they’d sealed off the place, and peeled off the sheet, they found it was stamped on the back, “no asbestos.”

Well, that’s a weight off my mind. And several hundred dollars out of my pocket.

This Asbestos dream home

Work on the bathroom continues apace.

Or at least it did, until I took a few loose tiles off the bathroom wall, and discovered what appeared to be sheets of Asbestos making up the wall.

Now, Asbestos was once considered the wonder material for building. You could turn it into sheets. It wouldn’t catch fire. You could drill it, saw it. Even make a bathroom cabinet out of it. I know: we had one in the family.

But after a while, people started getting ill. In the UK, it was only used for a few garden sheds, but in Australia most of the post-war dream homes of the Western Suburbs were built of the stuff. And that was when people started keeling over, in alarmingly high numbers.

Instead of being inert – as many builders had thought (as in, wouldn’t ‘ert a fly), it was infact composed of millions of minute fibres, that once sawn, broken, drilled, anything in fact that was the reason why people bought it in the first place, and it would lodge in the lungs, causing a painful death some 20 or 30 years later.
Sydney is now the asbestos death capital of the world, with thousands dead thanks to what they thought was a new life in the country.

And now I’ve found my asbestos sheets, I’m understandably anxious that I don’t follow them. Which is why the whole gammit of environmental waste disposal are swinging into action on Tuesday, sealing the place in plastic, sucking the life out of the air (but, you note, not me) and carting off a ton of asbestos.

Death of a Door Mouse

I don’t know why, but all the doors in the old part of the cottage have huge gaps under them. Not the usual crack that allows a bit of light under, but a huge whopping great big chunk that means mice escape under them when the cat goes chasing dinner.

Actually, I won’t lie to you. I do know why. Some of the doors aren’t original: the give away is in the hinges, where the doors were clearly on some other door, before this house had its disastrous 1993 ‘restoration’ which will take me ages to restore back to the original. I mean, look at the hinges, there are obvious gaps in the woodwork where the old hinge went, and now there is a new one at some other silly location.

And big chunky hinges they are too, still with a Bunnings price tag – all of $3.95 in 1993.

However, I don’t like the gaps. The draft roars through. So I came up with a cunning plan. Plane the bottom of the door flat & level. A chunk of wood under the door. Screw it on, Plane it level with the door. Fill around the gaps, paint, and there you go.

All was fine, until, as I was about to put the door in place, I dropped it on the floor, leaving a nasty dent in the dining room floor (on the only pristine plank in there, damit!) and smashing the bottom.

I then wasted a day putting the door back together.

I did attempt to get some brasso to polish up the original door furniture, but after a lot of effort scraping the paint off, it was in a pretty bad condition. 

However, I then realised I’d been left a ‘box of bits’ in the loft by the original house restorers. And there, low and behold, where some more key hole surrounds and the like: all the door furniture in the house isn’t original, as I’d though. It was instead purchased mail order from Legge in the UK 20 years ago. 

They’d ordered some spares, and it was the work of a moment to pop them on my newly painted door.

Catch her on the fly

My aversion to Australian type door catches is well known: as I’ve remarked before, out of all the things Australian’s do, one thing that they cannot, do, is work out how to design pretty looking door handles, locks and catches. But, if you want something plastic, round, and with a flimsy hidden lock from the 1960s in white plastic. It is the land for you.

All of which explains why, each time I fly back to London, I end up buying door furniture. Which gives me something to do there, and which gives me very odd looks when I go through customs.

This time, I ended up getting hold of a Victorian style pad bolt for the bathroom door. Totally unobtainable in the Antipodes, they were produced in their millions in the UK from the mid 1850s, and are still made today. Alas, the Cambourne B&Q (where I ended up doing my shopping on my way back to Newquay airport – but that’s another story) only had brown ones, not the classic black. But no matter – 12 thousand miles later, and I came to put it onto the door. And there I found that there were some old screw holes from when the door was first put on the bathroom back in 1865. And would you believe the screw holes match perfectly.

I can only conclude that the English chap who built this house 150 years ago imported – as you did then – his locks from the England. And a century and a half later I did exactly the same thing, and got the same type of lock which has probably come off the same machine that has been pressing them out ever since.

I then repeated exactly the same trick with the window catches. The builders who did such a terrible job of renovating this house back in 1993 put on some fake ivory ones from Bunnings. They were obviously wrong, as they fouled the glazing bar of the sash window, taking chunks out each time I opened or closed it.
However a small hardware store at the back end of Covent Garden had some lovely brass ones which looked as if they would match the only original window catch in the building. And they do – even down to the screw holes.

There’s a certain kind of serependipidy about finding bits to put back on the house that are still made exactly the same way as they were when the house was new.

The gate mail

The wood, for my gate, uncut

Today, I’ve built a gate.

Not any old gate, but a real proper old fashioned picket fence gate. The sort of gate that would have originally been between the fence posts, but which now is oddly missing.

I know why it’s missing. In Kellyville – the Pleasant Village – there’s quite a few mentions of my house, which was one of the first in the village. It notes the great festivities there were on New Years Even in 1899. And how, after the partying has ceased, a group of boys had swapped over the gates on all the houses in the dead of night.

Mitre saw to cut the angles

And so, my house has had no gate for the odd hundred years or so. Give or take 10.

However, it also means that people tend to use the front lawn as a shortcut between their house and collecting their mail (There are no letter boxes in doors in Australia – all of the post is delivered to the road), and I was determined to get a gate on it as soon as possible.

Half complete gate

However, those on offer from the local hardware stores just look wrong. Fine on a 1960s chalet of which there are plenty in Kellyville, but not quite right for an old settler’s farm house.

So, knowing that it would take me all weekend – all long weekend – I bought the wood, and set about making it myself. Never have I been more grateful for Aldi having occasional power tools throughout the year. This week was power mitre saw week. And very useful it came in too, for getting neat 90 degree cuts, and then 45 degree cuts for the middle section.

My completed gate

Using pencils as spacers got a neat gap between all the strakes, short screws to hold it all in place, two coats of paint, and then some galvanised metal hinges.

It looks all the world like the one that was swiped in 1899.

Lawn Free

There was, once, a car space at the front of the house where the residents of the townhouses (built on the old garden) were wont to park. Which is annoying, considering its not townhouse land. It’s mine.

Not that that stops the residents of the townhouses from parking there, so while I was excavating the drains I hit on a cunning plan: turn it into a fine stretch of turf.

Of course the easy plan would be to dig the thing up, taking a pneumatic drill to the six inches of concrete and producing a lake of waste concrete.

However I had other ideas: what if, I thought, it was possible to just quietly bury the offending car park space so that if in the future someone wanted to park, say, a Winnebago on the ground, it would be easy enough to dig it up again.

Now normally you wouldn’t attempt to lay turf over concrete, but by spiking it – to improve the drainage – and burying it really really deep; a good eight inches should suffice – it was possible to get a neat level lawn.

Or at least future lawn: it’ll take all winter to grow, of course.

Commuted for Life

Slowly, steadily, I’ve built my Hadrian’s Wall. It is indeed the millstone around my neck, or rather my arms, as stone really is so very heavy. Of course, I could have used concrete, which would have been easier, quicker, and far more cheaper. After all, good quality sandstone costs $180 a ton, as my bank manager has been discovering.

The M2 in Sydney, having a bad day.

Which is why it is ever so irritating to drive past North Rocks – an area of Sydney that was apparently famous for its large upstanding rocks, until that is enterprising settlers who had their life sentences commuted to a holiday in Australia turned up with chisels and chopped up the lot. Now, there is just one road running through it, that is actually pretty useful, as it is a good shortcut to chop off Windsor Road, the M7 and the M2, which right now is a nightmare, and will be for two years, while they finally build the road that should have been there in the first place, which involves taking away – guess what – more rocks to build one extra lane.

So (there is a point to all of this, I promise you) many people are now taking that oh so useful short cut from Baulkham Hills, along Cook Street, Park Street, and Renown Road past the Ted Horwood Reserve. However, it too has turned into a nightmare, because it needs a bit of widening. And in the stupid way they do with Australian roads they have to take the speed limit down to 23 miles per hour, and then slowly chip away at the rocks, producing in turn endless frustration in the motorists, and also a huge pile of yet more rocks. Which – as I sit helplessly in my car, staring at it – I can’t help think I’d have to be a millionaire to afford.

And now, guess what? The RTA have proved that they are even more stupid than through possible (if that is, that is possible. The ship of state has a difficult road ahead). There were two lanes up Renown Road as it meets Barclay Road in North Rocks, but now there is only one. Two lanes allow the person at the top of the hill to take the right hand lane to turn right, but the straight ahead to do what cars do: move. No longer. There is now a sign saying that the lane has been closed “for your safety”, and when each car wants to turn right, they stop until the lights turn red, and allow a single car out. Therefore the queue moves at one car every two minutes, or 1mph.

It really was quicker by goat.

I digress: the RTA wastes everyone’s time, a lot of money, and huge pile of rocks, which I would have had for free to finish my wall, which is now, at last, slowly there.

And yet, now I’ve finished this herculean effort, there doesn’t appear to be all that much to show for it: just a low stone retaining wall, keeping in the flower bed, which you can’t even see from the house.

The Quarryman’s Relent

Railway sleepers are useful things. You can – just as an odd thought – run trains over them. You can use them to prop up the flower beds. And you can even use them as logs in winter when it gets a bit chilly.

Which of course is why the original builders ran a line of sleepers around the edge of the house where it drops away, to keep the flowerbed from falling into the garden. This might, on the face of it, be seen as slight overkill: after all, why would someone go to this much effort to stop the daffodils from falling into the car park.

I’ll tell you why: because the lazy idiots put the drainpipe for the main gutters only about two inches beneath the surface, rather than the NSW regulation for drains, of being a good meter below the topsoil. To cover up this mess, they just plonked a sleep on top – to protect it – and walked away, having saved themselves a lot of effort in digging a huge ditch.

Which all works fine, until some twenty years later the termites have eaten away half of the sleepers, and when they, in turn, start collapsing into the car park.

I could hear the handwriting on the wall: it was time for them to go. Not realising how monumental an effort it would be to replace them, I thought it might be good to put in a small sandstone retaining wall. I just couldn’t understand why in Australia, so many people love a low retaining wall made out of concrete.

I’ll tell you why: it’s a lot lighter. You have no idea how heavy a ton of stone is (other than a ton of course) until you load up a boot full of the stuff ready to build the wall and get excavating. I did wonder if the chap at the local quarry had been bodybuilding, from the huge bulging biceps: oh no, you get that from just lugging this stuff around. After seeing me filling up the car with the stuff, he finally relented with the last stone, gently carried it over, and laid it on top.

As I drove along the road with a ton of stone in the boot and the nose of the car high in the air I could just about feel the front car wheels lightly touching the ground. Occasionally.

It really is very, very heavy. But, equally, it is very pretty too: it even has a fossil in it and everything.

Now I can build my Cotswold stone wall, in Australia. It'll look quite at home among the gum trees. And also annoy all the residents of the town houses by taking my car park space back.

The flying picket

There’s a picket fence in there somewhere; I know there is.

It’s on the heritage listing, so that must be right. Although why anyone would want to heritage list a fence that was put up in 1993 and came from Bunnings is beyond me, but there you go: there’s no accounting for folk. Particularly not folk with the power of a heritage order in their hands.

But this doesn’t get me any closer to my picket fence, which once I’ve attacked the bush with a large (but cheap: it was from Aldi) hedge trimmer, was once again present for the first time in 20 years: in all its collapsed glory.

It was almost a study in how not to leave some wood outside, because the top of each picket, with grain exposed to the rain, had disintegrated into matchwood, while each vertical bar was flapping around in the breeze or flying off, which left me up a tree without a paddle.

I actually went to the trouble of buying some new posts & rails: but why do this when you can fudge. All it took was a strong lean to the right, screwing each bar back in place: and lo!

It’s like a new picket. Or would be, if the paint was even roughly up to scratch. Some more work with the sander, and then hours and hours with a paintbrush.

Fur from the Madding Crowd

One of the delights of having a little ball of fluff helping you out when you’re renovating, is that the little tinker tends to pick up anything small, and wander off with it. Particularly as this little small creature is in training to become a good ratter, and so likes to wander off with pens, screwdrivers, and once even a small hammer to take into a corner and chew to death.

Bluebelle, the Blue Point Himalayan cat

Right now I’m at the stage when I need to put a door back on the East wing bathroom. For some reason some anonymous idiot decided that it made sense to have an open plan bathroom; even more nonsensical when you consider that there are two open plan offices in the laundry at the back, and so everyone can hear when you go.

It is however rather impractical in a normal house: plus, the little ball of fluff tends to stick her head into holes in the floor, drains, and pretty much anything else she can find to play with, in between the usual bursts of eat-play-sleep, eat-play-sleep until the cows have, literally, gone to sleep.

So, to get around this, I needed a door, and the same idiots who took it off, also left it leaning against the wall in the West Wing: it’s a perfect fit, or would be if they hadn’t taken off the door jam, and replaced it with some fibre board from Bunnings.

A little bit of jiggery-poker with a spare bit of trim from the gents loos, freeing up the hinges with 3-in-1 (a lovely oil from the UK, that thankfully Woolworths in Australia import at vast expense) and back pops on the missing door.

Bluebelle: up on my shoulder, like any good cat

Alas, one other thing was missing: the door handles have small grub screws to hold the handle in place: they also look very much like a grub to a young cat, who after playing with it (you know, to ensure it is dead) for 20 minutes or so, when asked to hand it back, inconsiderately ran up the corridor with it between her teeth. I finally cornered her in the dining room, where with nowhere to go, she took one look at my trouser leg, jumped up it, dug her claws into my chest, and with a monumental effort launched herself onto my shoulders, where she sat like a rather contented parrot.

With a rather satisfied grin, she opened her mouth, and out popped my grub screw. I thanked her, as I was staunching the flow of blood from the large open wounds in my legs.

For the Perm of his Natural Life

Yesterday, a tree fell on the house.

Which would not be surprising if we were in the centre of the cyclone zone up in Queensland, in the flooded devastation of Victoria, in one of the many other earthquake zones, well, anywhere you name at the moment.

But no. Just good old Sydney.

However, we do have a special type of tree of the genus Eucalyptus – called optimistically the Widow Maker.

It has a habit of dropping large (often half the diameter of the trunk) boughs without warning reducing the life expectancy of anyone who lives under one by about half, and making the kitten’s hair stand on end in a permanent perm.

This form of self-pruning may be a means of saving water or simply a result of their brittle wood. This is also an efficient way of attracting wildlife that live in the holes formed which gives the gum trees a source of natural fertiliser.

However it’s put a massive dent in car port, and if the car had been under it, that would have been the second Ford to have been written off in two months.

However it’s no use leading a gift horse to water without making it drink, so  I woke up and smelt the music: this one tree will keep the log fire going all winter.