Roof ready for Dec 25

It poured with rain again last Saturday night but with four solid walls and a roof we wern't worried about the state of the new room.  It was all water tight.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the rest of the house. We were just settling down to sleep when the water started dripping onto the bed from the ceiling.  We turned on the light and put on our glasses to see a rust coloured line, bearing beads of water, forming on the perfect alabaster white ceiling. I leapt up to get a towel and a bucket and arranged them down one side of the bed.  Of course, there was no getting back to sleep. The soothing pitter patter of rain on the roof was translating to an unsettling drip drip into the bucket and my mind went on an all night wander.

I've slept in tents in pouring rain that were water tight, so how can water get through a newly tiled roof? This, plus naming all seven dwarfs, wondering where the scones I purchased but never made it into the house got to, and trying to work out why the builder asked us to purchase two lengths of granite when we only needed one bench top, meant I was wide awake.

It did stop raining, the dripping stopped and we did get to sleep eventually.  However, I wasn't up for much the next day.  I did a spot of weeding and found my car keys. Why I had decided to turf my car keys in the garden is anyone's guess. Thinking I might be on a roll, I kept up the hunt, hoping I might find some soggy scones - but to no avail. I'll probably find them in a month's time covered in mould.

The next day A the plumber turned up to do some more work on the new roof. I hadn't met him before, so we shook hands and I immediately re-directed him up onto the leaky tiled roof

In no time at all he had it fixed the problems down in the valley. Now it should be able to carry the weight of any type of sleigh or reindeer that happens to drop by.  I've got A's business card by the phone just in case.

S was here for a few days and got the new room lock up stage - well almost. The external doors and windows are in place but there is one pane of glass missing from the sliding door.  This is for the dog door -The very first thing that we planned.  There is some sort of problem with getting the dog door in the pane of glass. I'm sure we'll find out more about this in the New Year.

In the meantime we'll be shopping for lighting and working out the colour scheme.

I'll keep your posted.
Merry Christmas

Talkin' 'bout our renovation

There was a bit of a frenzy putting in the plasterboard and the planky stuff on outside wall, but now things have gone quiet for a while. P  headed off up the coast on Thursday for a surfing trip with his son and sidekick S has taken a few days off. There was no friendly click of the sidegate on Friday morning and nothing new to come home to on Friday night.

As you can see we've taken a bit of time out too, to do some washing.

However, we can't sit on our laurels for too long. P has left us with a list of things to do in his absence - choose colour scheme and lighting, order shower base and bench top; decide on shed roof overhang and where any new internal power points are to go; figure out the configuation of steps from paving to ground. The list is a photocopy so he can check up on us, I guess. Nothing is left to chance.


Of course we are now quite good at all this sort of decision making.  We've worked out the best spots for power points in the new room; bought second hand doors and very expensive door jewellery; and chosen tiles for the shower and timber for the floor. Nearly everything comes from Cochranes Road.

I'd never heard of Cochranes Road Moorabbin six weeks ago. Now I can drive there and back on auto pilot.  It is a street filled with warehouses of tiles, everything door - doors, security screens, knobs, handles and locks, windows, bathroom fittings, flooring, furniture, laminex and granite, and even muscle cars to match your newly renovated house.  If there's still anything you can't find, there's a Bunnings at the very end - big enough to have its own postcode.

Even though things have been going exceptionally well, deep down it must be causing me stress. This week I managed to lose my keys plus the spare car key all in one go. I finally found the spare car key but the main set of keys are still walkabout.

Just as well I found the spare .  It was going to cost $268 to get a locksmith out to cut another one - and that was with the RACV rebate.  Now I can spend the money on a light fitting instead.

one stirrup and three bottles

The building work has now been in progress for about one month and 110 millimetres of rain. Despite the weather setbacks, the new room is close to lock up.  The frame is in place and the roof is nearly finished; part of the neighbour’s fence has been pulled down and now forms a side wall to the room; and the doors we bought from a grumpy man in the second hand warehouse are arrived yesterday for installation.

The new sliding doors are in place as well as the feature window - well almost.  The architect designed the room on a beautiful angle.  However, as wind-out windows don’t wind out on an angle they hit the frame of the house.  This requires a bit of further thought. I can see P loves artistic architectural touches.

P has also dug up a stirrup.  How it got there is a mystery. Maybe someone was using a stirrup instead of a ring in a game of quoits , hurled it and never picked it up again – and then buried it because they couldn’t be bothered taking it inside. Kids!

Or maybe there used to be a horse attached to it but it rotted away over the years. But of course that doesn’t explain why there is only one stirrup. I discussed possibilities with P but he didn’t seem interested in solving the mystery. He is more interested in solving the mystery of architects.

It all fell into place when I realised that P had dug up more hidden treasure without bothering to tell me. There were three old bottles down the side path - two little medicine bottles and a bottle with the word s "almond cream" and stamped" made in the United States of America".

You’ve probably worked it out already, but I’ll go through it anyway.

Given this is Caulfield there have always been lots of horses around – even more in the olden days before there were so many cars. Anyway one day a horse, sick of clopping round the nearby racehorse, tore off down Queens Avenue after someone left the wrought iron gate open.  On exiting, one of the horse’s stirrups got caught in the gate and came off. The horse careered down Clifton Street and into our street. 

Somehow it ended up going down our side path into the backyard.  In its terror at being caught in a small confined spot, the horse reared up in panic a few times and then came down heavily on the concrete breaking its leg. You can imagine the shock this must have caused the former jockey who lived in our house. Forced into an early retirement after arthritis set in, he gingerly made his way outside to see what all the palaver was about.

Of course he had  empathy with horses – creatures that not so long ago shared most of his waking hours. He tried to ease the pain and distress by administering his two bottles of painkillers.  He also rubbed in some of his special cream bought in the States when he accompanied the doomed Phar Lap. Even though the former jockey had the best of intentions, there was no way that painkillers for arthritis and almond cream were going to be much help.

The horse died and because it is too hard to cart a dead horse away, kindly neighbours came over to help bury it.  Only the stirrup and empty bottles remain to tell the story.  I should have been an archaeologist. 

Of course this doesn’t explain what happened to the saddle the horse would have been wearing. Well, the jockey probably sold the saddle because it was worth something and he no longer had a steady income.

None of this solves the window problem.  I wonder if the builder will manage to solve it or if the price of cutting edge architecture is to stifle while admiring a beautifully angled wall.

...oh and here's a few shots of our extension so far.

Springing into life

P says he’ll be catching waves with his boys in southern NSW in two and a half weeks and we’ll be at lock up stage.

Hard to imagine but, yes the new room is really taking shape.

We chose the colour of the room last night – bushland – and the corrugated iron is now on order.

It was all action this morning with the builder, his helper, the plumber and of course the plumber’s dog.

Digging up old things

So the new room can fit on our small parcel of land, the old brick shed has been cut in half.  As a result, the old workbench no longer fits, and is sitting out in the backyard.  

You couldn’t really see it when it was in the shed.  It’s been knocked together out of lots of pieces of old timber. I guess you’d call it organic.  Parts of it are painted a colour we used to call lavatory green. It reminds me of the one from my childhood in Eskdale Road – just over the other side of the racecourse from here. 

It was in an old corrugated iron shed with a dirt floor and Dad and I used to hang out there together on weekends.  He had a light over the workbench and fixed things; a replacement knob fashioned for my Etch-a-Sketch; a new handle made for the axe; the Noritake dinner plates, that mum threw at him in a rage, painstakingly glued back together; broken radios repaired; and wobbly legs on chairs made brand new again.

Dad thought, or perhaps hoped, I had a practical side but I just liked watching him as I twirled the handle of the red vice in and out. It was the place where all the problems could be sorted out. 

If something proved difficult to solve he said, ’This is set to try the likes of you and I, but we won’t be beaten will we?’

And I’d smile tentatively, willing him on to victory.

He worked away in silence, totally immersed in the job in front of him. Sometimes thinking he was in his dental surgery he’d call me nurse,  and ask me to hand him a wood planer or a chisel or to hold on to one end of something and pull .  Things could get pretty rough in a dental surgery back in the sixties.

Then finally I’d hear the magic words, ‘Now we’re cooking with gas,’ and I knew everything was going to be just fine.

On the eve of construction

We used to wake up to my alarm but I don't need it anymore. Blundstones down the side path and cheery talk about weather or cricket or where to put the newly arrived timber, get me up well before 7.30 am.

Yes, after two years of planning with J the architect we have finally got to the building stage. We’re adding a room and making a few internal rearrangements. Why did the planning stage take so long? Well, I don’t think J the architect ever had enough the time for a little job like ours. He is very kind and took it on as a favour. 

I’ve known J for a long time. Thirty years ago, he had a tiny Edwardian brick house in North Carlton. A bit like this one, when I think about it. He lived there with his then girlfriend and her two wild boys aged about four and six. His sister M, her partner B and I ran a singing telegram business from his attic.  It was bedlam twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Somewhere in the middle of the unrelenting chaos, he was trying to establish himself as an architect.

There still don’t seem to be enough hours in the day for him. Teenage children of his own now and a large practice to manage. Once, after an on-site early meeting with him, he drove me into town.  I noticed the orange light on his fuel gauge and suggested he might need to fill up. He said we’d be fine. Not only did he know that it was on, but he knew exactly how many kilometres he had left before we conked out.

Anyway, somehow we cajoled the plans out of him and one by one ticked off the required bits of paper work - the building permit, boundary survey, and soil testing. And now we have P the builder on site. He has been in action for two weeks now and is aiming for lock up before Christmas. He’s even here on Saturdays to make sure he gets everything done on time.

P appears to be the ultimate planner. When we signed the contracts, I was impressed that he gave us a prioritised list of places for choosing knobs, tiles, doors etc. Even more impressive, when he realised we intended to get a dog, he sent me off to buy a dog door so he could install it in the yet to be made up sliding door on the new room.  All before he had turned the first sod.

It all seemed logical to me until I got to the pet shop. I was finding it hard to decide on the size we needed. The shop assistant called me lady and said that getting a dog might would be a help.