Chapter 25 - Less food, more work.
Blue building paper, soon to be covered.
In and amongst all the near-death experiences and protein overloads at the block, we did have regular days of plodding along, working our way through the ever-growing list of ‘Jobs To Do’ and making improvements to the shed. Josh did a lot of the building work, and sometimes his son Saige came along to help out. One big job they completed was lining the shed. Every morning for over a year I’d lain in bed, staring at the exposed blue building paper with its stomping rhino logo, reading the same text: Rhino Roofing – Fall Arrest Sarking over and over and over. The text was unattractive, but I’d grown quite fond of the rhinos – they reminded me of my brother whose favourite animal had been the rhino. The walls went up around the same time he died and covered the rhinos, but I liked thinking of them in there – gone but not forgotten.
We also engaged a concreter to build an extension along the western side of the shed. Yes, a concreter, not a builder – more on that later. The new space would house a 3 x 3m bathroom at the southern end, with sliding doors to give views from the bath out to the granite, then the remaining 10 x 3m would have an office in the middle section and bedroom at the end, with more sliding doors and views to the dam.
I was particularly excited about getting the bathroom. As much as we loved the outdoor shower, it had issues. The soap invariably fell onto the ground and got coated in skin grating gravel. The tap nozzle had only two settings: full bore jet or wide flappy circle, hollow in the middle and blown away at the edges. And there was the wind. We’d tried hiding behind the tank, crouching down low, but those sneaky breezes sought out our hiding spots, rushed at us excitedly - Found you! We needed protection, and nothing says windbreak like four walls.
As with everything at the block, there were delays with the extension build. The concreter kept pushing the start date back due to rain, wind, a hospital visit, a mate that needed a hand, school holidays, but we hung in there with him because he’d worked with a shed building company back before he became a concreter and knew a bit about sheds, and also, there was no one else. Throughout the extended extension building process, I kept saying: ‘Oh, it will be so good to have four walls when we shower.’ Over and over I said it, so often it became like a mantra – Four walls, four walls, four walls. I should’ve added ‘and a roof, and a roof, and a roof’ because it turned out the concreter had under-ordered the roofing sheets and was 3 metres short, his defence being that he wasn’t used to ordering building materials, only concrete. Sadly, he had another, urgent job to go on to, so wouldn’t be able to get back to our place for a month, but not to worry, he would definitely order the extra sheets and send us the bill.
‘Thank you’ I said, with a level of gratitude he did not deserve.
Extension begun.
Extension with ceiling, walls and painted floor.
While we waited for a complete roof, we planned out the bathroom.
Anyone who has ever built or renovated a home will know that the bathroom involves multiple visits from multiple trades: carpenters, concreters, tilers, plumbers, electricians and painters. There is a choreographed order, tradespeople come and go and come again like synchronised swimmers, and if one misses their queue, it messes up the entire show. I know all this, but for some reason I put that knowledge to one side when it came time to install our bathroom in the shed, perhaps because we were on a tight budget and planned on doing a lot of the work ourselves. In hindsight, I may have overestimated our skills based on the fact that Smash had done nine months of a plumbing apprenticeship in his youth, before running away to join the music industry, and my credentials were that I’d once tiled a metre square splashback behind our stove.
‘It’s not rocket science,’ he said.
‘That’s true,’ I said, thinking of the time our toilet in Brisbane overflowed onto the carpeted hallway when Smash was fixing the cistern.
We went into Stanthorpe to visit Four Water, a plumbing supplies shop owned by a lovely and helpful guy named Shorty who was very patient with us, and all our questions. Plumbing may not be rocket science, but there are many things to consider. Very quickly, I realised that doing the bathroom was not something I wanted to bodgey up. I wanted it to look nice, work well, and last a long time. I also realised that Smash and I had differing views on how that would pan out, and after our third plumbing related argument, we agreed that doing the bathroom together was not good for our marriage. Instead, I suggested we wait until the following weekend and get Henry to help him, as a Father’s Day treat.
To his credit, Henry agreed. He’s the first to admit that handyman tasks are not his forte, but it was a Father’s Day request, so he went along with it. With no one at home to look after the cats, however, we had to take them down to Nundub with us, as all the boarding kennels were fully booked over the Father’s Day weekend.
I wasn’t too worried about taking the cats to the block. Boris is fifteen years old and spends most of his time either asleep or washing - washing himself, or Mabel, or someone’s arm, plush toys, furry couch cushions - pretty much anything that has hair and stays still. As for Mabel - we should have called her Lazy Susan. Even as a kitten she never did much, would fall asleep ten seconds into a wash, and we are yet to see her run anywhere. Still, there was a lot of coming and going at the shed, dogs and visitors alike; it was likely the doors would get left open and I didn’t want the cats killing wildlife, or getting eaten themselves by a fox, or feral cat. They would have to be constrained in some way, so I did what I always do and got on to Gumtree to see what I could find.
Mabel doing her exercises.
Mabel exhausted after playing for 2 minutes with Jack and Erin’s cat.
