Rubbery Under Arms

Ceiling with the two slightly mad downlighters

I’ve spent a week going around in circles.

Nothing new there you may think.

However the circles of which I allude are in the ceiling. The ceiling of the dining room no less. It is a lovely room, with a majestic fireplace, and an en-suite bathroom. This is a rather odd addition you may think – and you’d be right – but the room was also once the master bedroom, until everyone got fed up of the roar of the traffic outside the thin single glazed windows, and the cooing of the blasted Night Parrots up the chimney.

To make matters worse, the designers-of-RSL clubs who once owned this place turned this room – which way-back-when was actually the tap room of the original pub: hence the fireplace – into an office. And along with trashing the floorboards with a roller chair, also cut large circles out of the weatherboards in the ceiling for down lighters, before covering the lot in six inches of good solid insulation.

I'm not trying to poke holes at anybody, but this was an act of monumental stupidity.

Amazingly, the place didn’t burn to the ground, but the down lighters are stunningly ugly. Removing them simply leaves large holes, which need some way of filling them. For, oh, half a second, I did consider ripping off all the planks on the ceiling to replace with new ones, but the heritage listing rules in Australia even forbid you from lifting a floorboard to lay new cables (insane I know!) even if you put them straight back in place, so I had to find another solution.

Button your sanding belts: I came up with a way by means of a single, termite ridden board which was warped into a curve exactly like the ones on the ceiling. There was just enough of the board left to cut out with a large circular drill a hole exactly the same size as the ones on the ceiling. Pop on some bracing over the top, and then screw down over the hole. Put some filler around where it doesn’t quite match, and sand to taste.

The hole filled - with another hole!

Then sand again. And again, to get the profile just right. After half an hour of holding the sander over my head, watching the sawdust fall like, well, sawdust into my eyes. I’d had enough. And so had my arms which had turned to rubber.

But, several coats of paint later, and the result is all but invisible. Plus it keeps the listing officer happy. Trebles all round.

Door little Rich Girl

I have a working back door! Two of them! Ok, Ok, technically this hovel has two front doors and two back doors, plus a surplus of French Doors into the car-park (sorry, garden) which are nailed shut due to the office portions. But the door I refer to is the old laundry door, which opens, via flight of rickety wooden steps, down to where the bins – all three of them! – are lined up.

These bins are a separate issue – the council, in its infinite wisdom, when it finally twigged that this was no longer a pizza restaurant, nor a design studio for RSL clubs (I  kid you not: the architectural practice that owned / wrecked it practiced (in the art of not getting it right very often) the art of designing the sort of RSL club that sucks the very soul from your body. And in the process, got very rich. Rich enough to move out.) annnnyyyywaaaayyyy... the bins. Oh, yes, when the council twigged it was just a normal house again, they insisted that our bins were far too large, and we needed a normal domestic bin. They were duly left for someone to swap them... and what do you know. No one touched them, and there are still three illegally large bins (only two in the photo: this was before "The Fight for the Green Bin", of which more, anon).



Door Barrel Bolt - half inch of solid steel

 I digress. The door. It is rough wooden door, with just enough room for lizards to climb under the gap and run around inside. It also has a very shaky lock on it, so you may remember in a post about three months ago I wrote about the insane habit of the Australian Government banning door bolts as a public safety hazard. Thankfully on a recent trip to the UK I managed to secure a couple, and finally today got around to bolting the door before the lizards did likewise.

And very secure it is too. With a half inch barrel of solid steel, running into the door jam, it’ll have to be a tough lizard to break through that one. It's like locking the barn door after the nuts have bolted.

The Year My Vice Broke

A story about a carpenter’s lament
I’m now well into the third room (which sounds like a university department – something like the Centre of the Third Way... I digress) after a very intense day in 42 degree heat. At least it would be, were it not for the beauty of ducted air conditioning.

There I was, eight feet up a ladder indulging in the fun sport of sanding yet another ceiling flat (painters the world over, I’ve noticed, are incapable of painting a ceiling without leaving large blobs and drips all over the surface as if the wood was infected by some hideous wart), taking off planks and gripping them firmly in a vice (or, since this is a vice from Aldi, loosely and wobbly).

And then suddenly, the lethal sander (see the post: The Fatal Chore) went Phutt, and was no more. An hour long repair job on one half of its switch, half an hour more sanding, and Phutt... again! Now the other half had disintegrated. That put a monkey in the wrench.

I had no option but to bite the bullet and grit my teeth. Or, since this  would involve taking the bits of bullet out from my teeth, taking a trip to Bunnings and asking for a new sander, cos this one is no more, and it ought to be six feet under, pushing up the daisies.

I really didn’t care for the salesman’s smirk when he asked what I’d been doing with the battered old sander that looked as if it had been in a war zone, as opposed to being just 2 months old, and just sanding down 200 square yards of planks. Upside down. Oh, he explained, the Ozito Sander is only designed for sanding down a few windows, not heavy industrial use. Hmmm... I didn’t tell him I’d already sanded down four windows already.

At least I’ve come up with a new way to do the ceiling: paint the grooves with a brush first, and then paint the planks, which means I can see where I am, even if this gives a unique striped effect for a few days.