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.