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.