Chapter 16: Living simply, with a hoarder.

Portrait of a hoarder.

I didn’t realise it when I met Smash, but he is a hoarder. When he showed me his bedroom in Randwick for the first time, there were no hints that he didn’t know how to throw away stuff. In fact, I was taken aback by the spartan décor. Other than the built-ins, there were only three things in the room: a single bed with a teal coloured quilt, a bedside table, and on the bedside table, a 1940’s figurine of a kid on a sled, gleefully mid-flight on a slope of creamy coloured ceramic snow. An unusual choice of ornament for a rock and roll band manager, I remember thinking. Also, there were no personal touches, not even a discarded towel or t-shirt, which gave the room more of a ‘Do you have everything you need, Nana?’ vibe than, ‘Let’s spend the night together, Baby’. As it turned out, we didn’t spend the night there, in fact, in the entire time Smash rented the room he only spent one night there, just to prove the point to me that he did have his own place. A week after we got together, he headed off overseas on tour with The Falling Joys for seven weeks, and when he came home, he moved in with me and Jackson at our little flat in Bellevue Hill.

The point of this history is that his hoarding tendencies were kept well under wraps until we moved out of my little flat and into a rental house in Bondi Junction. All of a sudden, all this stuff appeared. A lot of it was from his parents, who sadly, had both died in their fifties. Cubic metres of photo albums and slides, along with the projector and screen. A train set packed up in a large brown cardboard suitcase. An entire tool room – and I mean entire – beautiful old tools, lots of them. A lot of records also: Bohemian Fairy Tale classics, traditional jazz and classical that Joe, his father loved, along with a record by Milan Chladil, the only Chladil in the world (that I know of) who can carry a tune. (He’s kind of a big deal in Czech Republic – Smash once got off having to pay a driving fine in Prague when the Policie České republiky recognized the name on his passport.)

I presumed there was some nostalgia fuelling Smash’s decision to hang on to his parents’ belongings but questioned the amount of mementos. He had his dad’s favourite trench coat and hat, shoes, suits and ties. His notebooks, letters, magazines, a stunning souvenir spoon collection with its own display board. Oh! And the crystal. The precious bohemian crystal. So much crystal. Where, I wanted to know, should the pot pourri dishes go? Did any of his five siblings want to share in the booty perhaps? There was also all of his own stuff including a Kawasaki 900 motorbike that wasn’t working, which he intended to rebuild one day. We absorbed all of it, and everything he collected after, and over the years, moved in to bigger and bigger houses, but I hated the clutter. It made me feel itchy and stuck.

Then one day, my Grandma gave me her upright piano. I didn’t realise it then, but it was the start of fightback: a different kind of hoarding. I was reminded of Smash’s favourite phrase when we’d met – ‘Less is more’. In the case of the piano, it definitely was. (And they really are as heavy as everyone says, aren’t they?) It was out of tune and some keys made no sound (and there was also the fact that I can’t actually play piano) but I loved it so much. Not long after I discovered an eight seater silky oak table for sale at a crazy price. Then I found myself irrationally attracted to a huge maple wardrobe that took four of us to move into the house and resulted in a popped architrave and a broken pendant shade. And so on.

Meanwhile, in the other corner, Smash was busily increasing his cache and specialising in building materials left over from renovations – plumbing gear, timber, bits of steel stuff, pipes – nothing was thrown out other than sawdust.

Smash: What did you do with that off-cut from the downpipe?

Me, looking at my nails: Chucked it.

Smash, outraged: Are you kidding me?

Then we’d have an argument about whether 8 centimetres of poly-pipe would ever come in handy. The hoarder’s lament: You just never know when ‘it’ might come in handy. I’m here to tell you: rarely.

For all the tasks we have undertaken, the off-cuts we have stored have always been, without exception the wrong size, sometimes by a millimetre, but still, NOT the right size. That’s why they’re called leftovers. With food, you can always reshape the remains into something worthwhile – with 8 centimetres of polypipe, not so much. We have hundreds of architrave, cornice and skirting board lengths downstairs that vary between one and two metres. I just can’t see us using them – unless we add on a room that is 50 x 50cm big. (And if anyone suggests picture frames, they are welcome to drop in and take away all the moulding.)

I will have to admit here, that once, a leftover piece of pipe did come in handy, but it didn’t come from our collection. My dad is a hoarder of building materials also, and in this instance, he had the exact shaped fitting we needed to fix our leaking laundry plumbing. Once.

Smash brings it up, every, single time I try to have a clean-up.

From the moment we bought the block of land, Smash’s answer to any query about decluttering was, ‘I’ll take it down to the block’. Every time he said it, I sighed a little louder. I’d sort of hoped the block and shed would be a fresh start with Quaker like simplicity – a few garden tools lined up neatly, of course, and a wheelbarrow, but not boxes and boxes of crap with labels like: Misc bits and pieces. Don’t chuck out. The issue of how much clutter to take down to the block caused quite a schism in our mutual tree change dream. Every time I frowned at a box of leads or funny shaped metal brackets, he’d mention the piano. He didn’t understand - that was different - it wasn’t clutter. I know this might sound a little extreme, but I had actual nightmares about suffocating under fallen boxes and shelves – or getting stuck in labyrinthine spaces with the walls closing in, no escape. Some people find clutter distressing, and I think I am one of them.

Then one day, while I was cleaning out my aunt’s garage after she went into a nursing home, I saw Poppa’s old work bench. He and Nana had lived in the house before my aunt and he’d built the bench out of pieces of wood that he’d had lying around. Bits and pieces of HARD wood. It weighed a tonne. Pop had made ten hardwood drawers for it, each of them nearly a metre deep and full of screws, bolts, washers and nuts, and if that wasn’t enough, he’d implanted a cast iron plate in the bench top, just to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere. I fell in love with it on sight. Dad came over and we tried to move it a bit, but it wouldn’t budge even after we took out all the screws and bolts. (And thank you Trent for taking them off our hands.) Dad got his crowbar and did a bit of jiggery pokery, managed to move it a centimetre or so. We scratched our heads and joked about getting a crane.

When I told Smash about the work bench he was sceptical due to its size and weight, but he agreed to help me, I think because he knew it would give him carte blanch to take down his own load of stuff. He topped up his pile, and with every addition he’d calculate in a barely audible but very annoying whisper, just how much room it would take up in the shed, compared to, hmm say, a gigantic mofo work bench made of hardwood.

I went back over to my aunt’s garage to make sure I really loved it. I did. It was painted a light blue grey colour and had all sorts of divots and scars from bygone tasks. The drawers had inner drawers in them, trays with timber compartments, so that everything wouldn’t whizz to the back of the drawer when it was closed, and because they were hardwood, you could have the drawer fully extended and loaded up and they wouldn’t warp or cause the bench to tip over. She was coming with us. But how?

In the end, the Egyptians saved the day. Smash managed to get the bench levered just high enough with the crowbar to insert bigger and bigger chocks of timber, until it was high enough to slip a galvanised metal pipe under. (Which I just realised is another bit of left over building stuff that Dad lent to us.) Then we did the same thing at the other end – lever, chock, lever, chock – so the bench was sitting on a pipe at each end, ready to roll. We rolled the old girl along, bit by bit, leap-frogging pipes when needed until she was out on the footpath, ready to go into the trailer. Then Smash backed the trailer up, put a jack underneath the bench, got it just higher than the trailer, backed the trailer a little more and let the bench down. That poor old trailer – it’s dealt with a lot. More levering and chocking and finally she was ready to roll onto the trailer with the pipes. It stuck out half a metre or so, but there was no concern over it falling off. Dad was curious to know how we were going to get it off, or even up and over Cunningham’s Gap. As was I.

There was a moment when we were getting her off the trailer – I can remember it clearly and it still makes my stomach go all fluffy. Somehow, Smash got the bench up on one end when it came out of the trailer. In the process of levering her down, with Smash assuring me he could take the weight if we went slowly, there was a split second when things could have gone either way. Ropey veins bulged on Smash’s neck, his face went from red to purple, then he started swearing in a constricted way. I screamed ‘Watch out’ or something equally helpful and saw Smash’s life flash before my eyes – all those smashes and accidents – was this how it was all going to end? Squashed wafer thin under Poppa’s bench? And how would I get him out? Lever and chock? Smash choked out the word, ‘Chock’ (I think) but before I had a chance to run and get a piece of wood, he let go and jumped back. There was an almighty whump that vibrated through to my teeth (and made a crack in the concrete apron). We looked at each other, silent, wide eyed. I felt like I should hug him, be happy he was still alive, but I was too shocked.

Since letting the bench slam down onto the concrete apron, we’ve had to move her more than once, using the steel pipes, levers and chocks every time. It’s very time consuming, and leaves us both with aching backs. Smash shakes his head and sighs and mutters stuff under his breath, and when I say, ‘Sorry? What was that?’ he says ‘Nothing, dear’. I’ve come to understand that in any relationship, there is compromise, different loads to bear and in the light of Smash’s good grace regarding Grandma’s piano and Poppa’s old bench, I’ve decided to live with the polypipe offcuts and random pieces of alloy, a lot of which now reside in the bench.

Who would throw that out?!