So That Happened

My flat is the top floor of an old house and when I say old it’s somewhere between 100 and 150 years old.

This has a number of pros and cons.

There’s the gorgeous old exterior which is countered by the aspects of the interior design which obviously weren’t designed to accommodate the size of modern furniture.

There’s the beautiful high ceilings which give a light airy feeling of space but which mean that heating the place in winter is a bugger.

There’s the lovely vintage sash windows which are really difficult to clean properly thanks to the way the glass sits and the fact that the insect screens are permanently fixed to the window frame.

But one of the less whimsical or design-based things about having a house that old is that over the years various owners have altered or added to the house.

Some of those additions or ‘improvements’ are rather old.

Some of them were undertaken when there wasn’t a lot in the way of regulations in place.

Some of them probably took place when regulations were in place but the owners thought ‘eh, we can do it ourselves, who needs to know?’.

One of the main offenders in this case was probably my previous landlord who sold to my current landlord.

He had a very ‘I’ll do it myself’ attitude which was both innovative and somewhat concerning.

You’d have fences made of materials he had to hand.

He crafted a greenhouse of out random lengths of metal pile, wood, clear plastic sheeting and twists of wire.

He had a hoarder’s paradise of a shed where he’d always have something he could use to ‘fix’ or replace something that was broken or playing up.

The reason I’m bringing all this up is because when I got home yesterday most of my lights and half of my power points weren’t working, and when I went around testing them all to see what was and wasn’t functioning I found this.

Yep.

That, my friends is a smoke stain.

From when the light – which was not on – shorted out during a rainstorm we had that day and released what I assume was a terrifying spark and deposited soot on the paint.

My current landlord is thankfully a registered electrician so I went downstairs and dragged him up to work out what the hell had happened and whether I was in any danger of waking up on fire in the near future.

He took apart the light fixture and checked the wiring and it looks like the short was caused by a build up of dust and bad wiring rather than direct contact with water getting into the roof buuuuuuuuut there’s still some concerns about why it happened on the day with the heavy persistent rain.

He also checked the old fashioned fuses to see if more than one had blown.

Only one had but when looked at it his eyebrows just about catapulted off his forehead because the wire that had been used was NOT fuse wire.

They had used a bit of wire about the right size made of a conductive or semi-conductive material which they had presumably just had to hand because why bother buying fuse wire when you can just use this wire!? Waste not, want not!

THIS is a prime example of the gut-clenching terror that you can experience when you find some of the ‘eh, we can do it ourselves work’.

There are exterior lights which have been taken down since new landlord took over because the first time he saw them he went very still and just said ‘those aren’t earthed’.

There were extra power points which had been installed via the highly professional technique of pulling an existing power point out from the wall, splicing in some extra wire, fixing that wire to the skirting board with little u-shaped fixtures which ran all the way to the new power point and then painting over that new wire to make it less obvious that this is what they’ve done.

I should probably be a bit more concerned about this but honestly in the almost 9 years I’ve been living there I haven’t had too many problems and there is a serene calm that comes from renting a place that will probably need to be extensively rewired and restored rather than owning a place that will probably need to be extensively rewired and restored.

I spent Friday evening watching TV by lamplight and cooking on my gas cooktop and despite the inconvenience, and yeah potential danger, I still love this place.

It’s pretty, crazy, and I get to enjoy that while handballing any problems to someone else who is coming back today to crawl around in the ceiling* and see if we’re likely to survive the environmental hardships of winter.

So yeah, my house could have caught fire but it didn’t so my brain has immediately gone ‘cool story, bro’ and I’ve sauntered onto the internet to tell people about it.

Because priorities.

Put It On The List

Time for another installment of Magic Future Garden That Will Have The Space And The Environmental Conditions To Support All These Plants (And Which I Hopefully Won't Kill Through Ineptitude)!

The previous installment can be found here.


Grevillea

Lovely colours and they bring in various birds.


Dwarf river wattle (or Acacia Cognata)

I just like the look of these, they fill their part of the garden nicely and look soft to the touch.


Woolly bush (or Adenanthos sericeus)

 But not as soft as the woolly bush which Mum and I call 'huggable Christmas trees'. These are lovely and very hardy.


Kangaroo paw

These are bright when they flower and as natives will deal with the odd year of shitty weather better than some other plants.


Pimelea ferruginea

Pretty as hell and apparently they'll bring in the butterflies.


Mulberry tree

We had one of these in our backyard in Coffs Harbour and I remember sitting on the fence amongst the branches picking ripe berries until I gave myself a stomach ache. Totally worth it.


Ornamental grapevine

I'm more interested in the look than whether they produce grapes or not. Growing your own grapes that turn out right, rather than bitter, is a bit of a crapshoot but having a nice vine that you can put across a trellis or use to shade you from the sun is a better bet.

Roller Derby

[This is a backdated post]

A lot of things I've learned in life have come from experience but most of the really important things I've learned have come from watching the people I love get around to things before me and then having to deal with the challenges and realities that follow.

In this circumstance it was my friend Riot and her fella, The Viking, building a house.

The amount of fiddling and decision-making and revising and miscommunication and setbacks and faffing about and hold-ups and casual thoughts about murder-suicide that came up during this process has been fascinating.
And more than a little daunting.

This could all be filed under 'things you were anticipating but didn't really comprehend the importance/extent of'.

One thing I completely knocked all our socks off was how much the interior painting would have cost.
The quotes they were given ran between $12,000 and $16,000+.

What.
The.
Hell?

Factor in the cost of equipment, of running a business, man hours, paint, travel and that still suggests that painters wake up every morning on silk sheets, have some caviar on bread that has been baked in house by their personal servants and then shower in a bathroom appointed with gold and marble.

Yes, the house is of decent size but it isn't a palace, the rooms are not infinite!

So, of course Riot and The Viking decided that professional painting could go to blazes and that they'd bloody do it themselves!

House painting is one of those 'not really difficult but people are worried about futzing it up or don't have enough time to do it themselves' tasks that have spawned an industry that I'm guessing has run away with itself a bit.
Painting an established house means having to be careful of the moulding, carpet/tiling/flooring and furniture.
Painting in a house that has just been finished and hasn't had any of the carpeting or tiling put down is muuuuuuch easier.
Especially as the builders had done something wrong a little earlier and as an apology had gotten all the ceilings sealed and painted for no extra cost, so yippee! No paint dropping in our eyes as we tried to Michelangelo* the ceiling.

Riot and The Viking declared this weekend to be Painting Weekend, tempted us in with the offer of food and their eternal gratitude.
Considering their regular level of hospitality is pretty friggin' impressive I wasn't going to pass up on a lifetime warranty and also it just sounded like fun.

Picking out clothes ratty enough to paint in was easy enough sadly** and for the most part it was a time-consuming doddle.
They'd bought good quality paint, rollers, brushes and trays, worded us up on how to do this right and set us loose on the house.
The one bit that is annoying and fiddly is 'cutting in' and 'not futzing up the architraves, skirting boards and moulding'.

You'd think that rollers would be able to paint a nice straight line up to the edge of anything that has an edge but the dang things get a bit wishy washy on the edges and don't push down as hard.
The thing they do do is have little fuzzy bits at the end which will trail paint across the underside edge of the moulding that does not need to be painted!
There was a little bit of furtive wiping of surfaces with clean cloths and/or bits of our clothing as we went along but we got it done.

All the communal areas and most of the rooms were getting painted the same shade of lighty beige-y whatever - one of those colours that you can't really describe because... pale - which made the whole process easier for the volunteer army.
The two rooms that were getting fancy different colours were Riot's art room (which was getting a strong aqua colour) and their theatre room (which was getting a deep rich red because they're both mad for Twin Peaks and figure you can pull that shit off in a room that is devoted to having the lights off for most of the time you're in it).
The two fancy rooms were being done at a later date by Riot and The Viking so there was no paint segregation or hardcore roller/brush washing to be done, just a lot of repetitive movements and yelling song lyrics and insults at each other.

By the end of the second day we'd gotten all the coats done in all the parts of the house we were allowed at and could collapse in a 'why did I have to spend so much of my weekend going up and down ladders***' pile.

I think at the end of the process the lessons I learned are as follows:

• 90-95% of painting is easy as, it's the last 5% that screws you up and has you reaching for the phone book****.
• Even when you're being careful you will get paint in your hair.
• The bits you worry will be obviously imperfect you won't even be able to find a few minutes later. The bits that stand out as needing work will be areas you thought were doing fine until you caught sight of them out of the corner of your eye.
• Riot and The Viking are way less OCD than I am.
• You are never too old to enjoy wearing overalls.

*It's a verb now, deal with it!

**Note to self, time to throw out some more clothes...

***As an official shorty, standing 5'1" (155 cm) I needed the ladder more than some others!

****Or more likely your computer or smartphone because progress!

Glossy Habit

I never thought this was a sentence I would type but...

I can't stop buying magazines.

I don't mean fashion mags or gossip mags or entertainment mags.

I mean house design.

Gardening.

Interior decorating.

I haven't even read all the way through the last one before I'm buying the next.

I don't know where this has come from.

I guess my frustrated 'must... build... lovely... home...' desires are bubbling over into an uncontrollable acquisition of house porn to gaze at covetously.

Some of it I look at and know that I would rather walk face-first into a cement pylon without flinching rather than have it in my home but it gives me ideas.

Even if it's ideas on things I never want in my own house.

Those ideas are just as, if not more, useful than ideas of things that I do want in my own house.

Ruling things out makes your vision clearer.

It's a bit of a bugger because the mags themselves aren't what you'd call super cheap and the seeds that they're planting in my mind will probably fruit into an incredibly expensive crop if I go through with some of these design ideas.

But I can't stop.

They're just so pretty.

Elusive Architecture

Architecture is a bastard.

There's a type of room I've wanted to include in my dream house floor plan for ages. I’ve known about this room since I’ve been to a couple of houses that featured it but I had to do a bunch of weird and sort of randomly worded searching to actually find out what it was called.

A mud room.

I’m sure there are other names for it but all the ones suggested by helpful folk were a bit too general for internet image searches.

When I plugged in ‘vestibule’, ‘lobby’, ‘antechamber’ and other entrance way type names, I got an array of pictures or descriptions which didn’t match what I was envisioning.

I finally hit upon the term ‘mud room’ and all the images that turned up for that term are exactly what I meant.

And I didn’t know how much I wanted one until I saw that bundle of images pop up.

They satisfy my organisation, tidiness and keeping-muck-out-of-my-house urges.

And my no-i-am-not-going-to-have-jackets-hanging-on-the-back-of-every-single-door determination.

These things here…

…very useful sure but once you’ve bought one you’ll end up with a whole collection of the damn things.

Put your coat in the wardrobe or have a special coat wardrobe if you’re into clothing segregation.

Don’t have them taking space up on the back of every bedroom, laundry and whatever-else door.

They make the room look all cluttered and you can’t open your doors all the way.

A mud room.

Added to the ‘must have’ list for my notional ‘one day’ house.

Disclaimer: My house will never at any time contain that many baseball caps.

Ricochet's Zombie-Proof Roman Villa-Inspired House Plan

The law of averages dictates that out there are people who are - to a greater or lesser degree - planning their dream house designs based on how zombie-proof said houses may be.

I personally have been considering this sort of thing ever since, I saw the movie Jurassic Park and realised how easy it would be for velociraptors to smash their way into the family house through the huge windows which grace every room, and eat my entire family*.

There are some existing house designs that you could opt for without drawing the suspicions of the council or the concern of your neighbours, such as the classic 'Queenslander'.

The Queenslander could definitely be a strong contender as long as you had a way to destroy the staircase safely, made sure that you had access to water and enough food stockpiled or a safe way to exit and enter the house without making yourself a snack or inviting observant zombies or human raiders back into your home.
The height would give some peace of mind as long as the stability of the foundations was assured and fire wasn't too much of a risk**.

But personally I like the idea of thick strong walls on the ground***, surrounding you and protecting fertile soil where you can grow vegetables and keep animals to help sustain you.
For that reason my preference would be for a modified enclosed Roman villa-style building.

To make this design more zombie-proof you would of course minimise the windows on the outer wall of the structure, and make sure that those that remained were small-framed and high-set to allow light and air where appropriate but no physical ingress.

The main door would be heavy, outward opening (so that pressure applied from the outside wouldn't open it) and easy to bolt and bar with both a thick wooden outer door and a heavy metal lattice portcullis as an inner door. If the outer door is breached the portcullis should hold back intruders whilst allowing you to kill and reduce them, hopefully driving them back long enough to secure the outer perimeter if safe.

The walls would be thick, both for protection and to muffle the moans of the undead which would cause psychological distress over time.

The roofs would be broad and set up with water collection/storage and solar panels.

The central space would be set up to allow the growing of fruit and vegetables and the keeping of chickens for eggs and meat, and goats for milk if space and arrangements allow.

A well to complement the collected water would be a wonderful addition for peace of mind.

The four corners could be adapted to each host a high observation tower to let sentries keep an eye on how things were going, man radios if available and possibly communicate with other survivors by means of shining lights or using mirrors to flash Morse code messages, use weapons if needs be.

The plentiful rooms would allow multipurpose areas: sleeping areas that could be transformed to living areas during the day, food storage and preparation, laundry areas, work and manufacturing areas.

If practical underground rooms could be included and used for storage and would be more appropriate for peaceful and safe sleeping areas.

And I guess I would explain all of this to the council and my architect as an attempt to get on Grand Designs Australia and hope that they buy it and don't have me put away in a mental asylum.
I expect it'll help if I don't actually indicate where gun turrets should be mounted on the towers.

And all I need to do to make this a reality is get rich enough to build this place whilst also making time to learn how to manage a garden, keep livestock, preserve foods, shoot and maintain firearms and make sure that none of the people who I plan to invite to join me in my lovely villa are the type to crack, throw the gates open and go running screaming into a horde because they can't take it any more****.



*I was a pretty mercenary child. I had calculated my chances of being able to save anyone seeing as the velociraptors would have access to every part of the house simultaneously thanks to all the windows, realised they were so low as to be negligible and had decided that my best bet would be to scramble into the top of my built-in-robe shelves, try and kick my way into the roof-space and then lie their with my fingers crammed into my ears trying not to listen to the sounds of my family being rent asunder.
Velociraptors are a lot faster and smarter than zombies, what other options did I have?

**Honestly if zombies overrun Australia, a pressing concern along with being eaten alive would be the bushfires that would likely break out and sweep across the country unchecked, burning out survivors and foodstuffs but hopefully crisping the hell out of a large percentage of the undead at the same time.

***And not having to worry about a sea of the undead swaying and moaning below you as you slept, constantly dreaming of the floor giving way and dropping you into their waiting arms...

****Or the type who will decide the zombies are a judgement from God and that we either deserve this because we've brought it upon ourselves OR that the zombies will only eat the unrighteous and that this is a test.

Things I'd Like To Have In My House But Possibly Never Will Because I'm Mental

Folding Screens

There could be monsters behind there.

YES, I KNOW I'M AN ADULT!

OK, fine, axe murderers. There could be an axe murderer hiding behind it.



Coat Racks

It looks good, right?

Functional, a bit classy if you buy the right one.

But if I walk through a darkened room that contains a coat rack, just about every time my brain will go 'shadowy spindly shape in the corner = intruder/alien' and completely flip out.

Sure the panic will last for a split second until my memory kicks in with 'durr, it's your coat rack' but a split second of terror every night for the rest of my life?

That has to have ramifications for you health.


Basements

Ahhhhhhh! OK, to be fair it would probably look more like this...

But basements are where they keep you until the neighbours stop asking where you've gone.

We all know this.


Anything Really Antique

It looks lovely until the vengeful spirit of its original owner leaves you torn to shreds and draped around your own house like bunting at a macabre jubilee!


Shower Curtains*

Not only do they suddenly try to cling all over you like a teenage boy at a school dance if you get too close to them during a hot shower on a cold day, we also know that shower curtains are only good for two thing...

1. Giving psychopaths a place to hide
2. Being stabbed through.

Ahem.

I know I'm not really going to be torn apart by vengeful spirits or eaten by monsters or murdered by a shadowy figure with an axe** but I have a truly overactive imagination and a 'you never know' attitude towards superstitions and the unexplained***.

I probably will get a coat rack and a folding screen one day, dunno about antiques, and I probably won't even have to think about a basement.
I know basements are handy for storage and for hiding during Cold Wars but in Australia we've never really gone in for basements in a big way, they're not that common.



*This addition care of Erin Palette who reminded me of the existence of these menaces!

**Fingers crossed!

***And the rock-solid belief that if you say something won't happen to you and are all smug about it that you're just about daring the universe to make it happen.

Daughter Of Planning Hermit: This Time It's Personal

To counteract the frowny-face head-shaking nature of the last post, here are a couple more things I would like in my imaginary 'some day' house*.


Dish Draining Cupboard


My Auntie Lina** and Uncle Ugo have one in their apartment in Torino and it is just an insanely good idea. It keeps the dishes out of the way, it allows them to drain somewhere that's designed to get wet, it allows a lot more space than a traditional dish drying rack, it's not cluttering up your bench space, and when it's time to put them away you just pop the cupboard open and take things out in an orderly fashion.

If I wanted to have the sink facing a window I'd have to rethink design but I think I could make it work.


Tilt-Turn Windows


These I also saw for the first time in Italy and they're wonderfully practical.

You turn the knob one way a certain amount and the windows open up properly and you can stick your head out and see who is at the door/what the person down the street is yelling about/whether there is a vicious xenomorph hiding in the shrubbery beneath your window***.

You turn the knob the other way a certain/different amount and the window pops out at the top allowing the passage of cool, fresh air into the room and hot stuffy air out of the room without having to open the entire arrangement.

Living in Australia this means I'd have to have fly wire outside to keep myself from being eaten alive by mosquitoes when I left the window top agape but I figure that could be managed.
Either just by having tilt-turn windows that open inwards, or by having inward opening tilt-turn windows and outward opening flyscreen panels.
I'd prefer the second option because that preserves the ability to stick your head out and have a nosey about.
As an Aussie I've almost never been able to do this because of fly wire being in the way.
It looks like so much fun in the movies...

I also like the Norwegian windows that have a set of windows that swing inwards on the inner edge of the frame and a second set that swing outwards on the outer edge of the frame that allow better insulation in winter but again I'd have to make allowances for flyscreens.
Maybe a rectangle of flywire secured by magnet strips that I could remove or attach at will...


French Doors In The Master Bedroom

I love French doors. These arched ones below are particularly gorgeous.


Now whether they open onto a balcony as shown here or a private courtyard as shown below will depend on how many storeys my imaginary house has and which level I chose to put my bedroom on.


The important thing is that they should be there, they should allow me to move from my bedroom to a relaxing section of the outside world and they should let copious amounts of lovely fresh air and outdoors smells into my bedroom whenever I should wish it!


Dutch Doors


This is another thing you don't see in Australia often, partially due to the aforementioned mosquitoes and so on but also because it just wasn't one of the things the Dutch saw fit to bring over or to share with the rest of us if they did.
I'm still a bit hurt about that, the Dutch.

I mean, look at how lovely they are!


You can get a bit of fresh air**** without letting pets or children wander in or out willy-nilly when they shouldn't.

You can chat to people who are outside when you're inside or vice-versa, hear things that are going on without having to open windows or doors, shut two parts of a door on somebody one after the other to emphasise how displeased you are!

Versatile!


Bathroom Fernery


My grandmother's house has a well-established fernery outside the bathroom window and it is the most absurdly soothing thing.

With the combination of the plants in the fernery and the shade-cloth that protects them, the light levels in the bathroom are gently muted, slightly green and it is always cool and refreshing.

It lets you feel like you're near nature without having to struggle to keep plants alive indoors or deal with the shed leaves, incumbent spiders or other such things.

It ensures privacy - none of that everyone can see your private moments tosh - and overall just gives the room a nice atmosphere.


Alcove Beds


A little room within a room.

A little nook to squirrel yourself away in and - depending on design - remain unseen.


Novel, an interesting use of space, and in some cases almost like having a secret room out in the open.

When I was a kid I imagined being able to turn my bed into a little secret room, I put bookshelves under my bunk bed in such a way that I had a little room underneath my bed, but if you'd told tiny me that these sorts of bed designs actually existed I would have lost my tiny mind.

Especially if it had a built-in book case and looked like it had been nicked from Aladdin.



Courtyard


There will be one. Yes there will.
It might not necessarily look like this one but look at that lighting.
Innit nice?

A nice place to relax and kick back by yourself or entertain if you feel so inclined.


Now I am aware that some of these features may make my house more susceptible to access by general intruders, thieves, weirdoes and zombies but I'll take measures to dissuade that during the planning stages.
I wouldn't want to get lax and then have to spend hours scrubbing brains and blood out of the nice rugs and wooden floors I'm planning on having.



*I am aware that if I did try and cram all the features listed here and in other posts into one house, it probably would end badly for me, for the house, and for my sanity and bank balance.
A girl can still dream though.
A girl can dream.

**Well, she's my grandmother's cousin but we call her Auntie Lina, and that makes her husband Uncle Ugo.

***Well the information will serve the people behind you well. You know very well what form the confirmation of presence will take.

****Are you sensing a theme yet?