A Broom of One's Own

Paint.

Oh what lovely stuff.

Apparently it is a liquefiable, or mastic composition which after application to a substrate in a thin layer is converted to an opaque solid film.

It is also a means to ruin. I’ve spent days trying to get the stuff off the walls.

I mean, just look at it! On the wall that once held a shelf, I had to replace three planks because the termites had had a good munch, but otherwise the planks were still sound. However the 1950s and 1970s repaint cracked off a strip up the centre of each plank.

So, in their infinite wisdom, the builders just repainted over the top of the lot, leaving cracked paint with chips that got into the new paint, that wasn’t even a pretty colour. I mean, muddy beige? The whole lot was then painted over again about 10 years ago with a very hard, solid, emulsion.

And the only way to get it off is the sand the lot down. Sometimes I feel like I'm swimming uphill against the grain, but the wood is slowly appearing. I’ve taken so much paint off, that I’ve been sweeping it up in piles – and that’s just the paint that’s gone into my hair and down my ears.
The broom has been getting a workout.

But, ever so slowly, I’m getting to the stage when it will all be done! Just a bit more paint and I’ll have buttered my nest.

The Magic Padding

Now that the shelf is down and the wall is, errr, out, I need to come back to the thorny subject of putting some padding in the wall to drown out the hoons reving their suped up Supras outside.

Bunnings have raised it to new depths their green credentials, by deciding to stop selling sound insulation, so I’ve been forced to use normal thermal insulation. I guess the Aussies don’t care much about being quiet. For me, Silence is Bliss.

However, I have been offered a great way of getting it into the wall. As I mentioned in one hand flapping, trying to stuff thick insulation down the wall from one side is pretty hard. However, with both sides of the wall free, and slightly more spongy thermal insulation, it becomes a whole lot easier.

Indeed, it’s one of the eureka moments, I was so excited my heart about fell out of my stomach. Instead of trying to prize apart weatherboards from the inside, when they’re locked together with a tougne and groove, so the only way to get em up is to split the two... from the outside the weatherboard is simple feather-edge. It pretty much just levers up, just like magic!

Hard Tomes

Time to approach the Fourth Wall of the Third Room, or as it’s known, the last and hardest wall of the renovation of the original cottage. Which explains why I’ve left it until last.

In part, it’s because it’s got a shelf. It’s the shelf in the room. And yet, from whichever angle you look at it, it’s still there. Indeed, never mind how many brackets I unscrew, it is indeed Still There. It was there again today. I wish, I wish it’d go away. When I came home last night at three, the shelf was waiting there for me.

I just had to get to the bottom of it. Or side, as it were.

It turns out that so heavy were the Hard Tomes expected to rest on it I wondered if it was designed for notes for the Dickens Scholar. A huge steel bracket was custom made, and then screwed to the frame of the house – and weather board nailed over the top.

Then, to make really really sure that even in an earthquake, when the house had tumbled down, the only thing still standing would be that cursed shelf, there were screws that could only be accessed by taking off the outside weatherboard into the plank of the shelf.

So, with a heavy heart, I ended up peeling off the external weatherboard too, just to take down a curious, out of place shelf. Finally I got it out – and the room suddenly seems so much bigger. Indeed, without The Shelf In The Room, it’s possible to see the grand proportions of the original tap room. Or it would be, if I had a wall left – at the moment there’s just daylight coming through the empty frame.

The Light Man Cometh

Australia really is the lucky country. Blessed with natural resources, saving energy really is the last thing on many people’s minds. Abundant coal means that electricity is there for the taking... and that induces a certain irrational exuberance in what remains of the national consciousness.

Energy Saving Light Bulbs, with Aga for comparison

And boy, do they like their their juice. I thought I’d been beamed down a rabbit hole and transported to some alternative universe where electricity was too cheap to meter, when I found the joy Australians have in 200watt carbon filament bulbs (illegal in all states in the EU now), along with heating their houses using electricity, an almost total absence of double glazing, and even the incredibly inefficient heating hot water with an immersion heater – again, the Australian standard, even though it costs vastly more than using, say, a decent gas boiler.

Indeed, I was shocked that not only had the builders rebuilt this flimsy wooden shack with no insulation in the walls, they’d also built it with no heating other than the 8kW (yes, 8!) industrial strength aircon plant, which of course has dual redundancy incase of a failure. Each time I turn it on so I can work on the latest Emirates A380 Seating Plan in the cool, the lights go dim! And the place is of course littered with 200 watt light bulbs, or for those outside... 500 watts. You can probably see this place on the moon.

I’m not attempting to join the bunny-huggers, or even be all that green, as I try and drag this house into some modern British sense of living. All I’m trying to do is keep the electricity bill in four figures... and so I’ve been shopping for energy saving light bulbs, swapping over every old one I find – I’ve been up and down the ladder like a light switch.

I’m used to the normal types you’d get down any Ikea in the UK. 8, 12, or 16 watts if you really want to throw the boat out, and go overboard into the house. Not so in Aussieland.

30, 45, or the amazing 60 watt monsters are the standard. They are literally the biggest light bulbs I have ever seen! They throw out a stunning 4000 candle power.

It takes energy saving to a whole new league. At least I can see the light at the end of the rainbow.

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.