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.

The Fridges of Madison Country

I’m getting fed up of desks. They are everywhere. Every single office I go into, there is another desk. Except, these aren’t offices any more. They are rooms, and will – one day, in the long distant future – be part of the house.

Take a desk, any desk. Please...

However the builders left behind dozens of desks, in the rather optimistic hope that someone would want them. Or possibly because they couldn’t be bothered to get rid of them. Either way, the house is desk a go-go.

However, I need more space – particularly because I want to get cracking on bathroom, and to do that I need to make a laundry, which at the moment is doing a good impression of a garden shed, being, as it is, rammed full of bikes, lawnmowers, a BBQ, and even, yes, a spade.

So, this lot goes into the office which for want of a better word is being called the junk room. And that in turn means that all the junk has to go. Including the 10 or so desks in there at the moment.

I did briefly consider sawing them up for logs: it is the onset of winter after all. However wiser councils prevailed and I’ve now gone for the wonder of a Council Cleanup Day.

In Australia there isn’t really such a thing as the local council tip. Instead, they’ll charge you if you turn up with Range Rover loaded to the gunnels with desks. Or any household junk you name. Which is why you often see abandoned fridges by the side of the road all over the counties in the Hills: it costs too much money in Sydney to be tidy. However twice a year you can ask the council to come around to your home, and clear away the rubbish. Which is what I’ve done. Now the desk are on the street, awaiting a little man from the council.