CHAPTER 8. LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (P.4)

It was a rather prolonged and drawn out application process that left us in the lurch for months, then, out of the blue and on my birthday, we were both offered interviews. Two months later, the two of us waltzed into the Halls Gap Parks Victoria depot reporting for training and ready to start our six month seasonal roles. And just like that, my job anxiety and funding for the next stage of the project was seemingly extinguished… (Dad joke quota exhausted).

Donning our bright new green firefighting overalls, Holly and I walked excitedly into the 2018/19 Victorian bushfire season with big smiles on our dials, keen to get stuck in and learn all these new skills. The season inevitably was one of the biggest bushfire seasons in years! I had come into the season naively thinking that I would be able to get work done on the house on weekends… how wrong I was! Large campaign fires had popped up over in East Gippsland and we spent half the fire season working on the other side of the state, over 600kms from the Nook.

I was eventually able to accept the fact that we would just need to be patient and wait for the off-season to start thinking about doing any large-scale work on the house. The Nook sat patiently alone, waiting on the hill until mid January 2019, when we managed to coordinate the installation of the glazing with the legendary Colin, of Thermosmart windows.

I took a day off and Colin and his boys drove up all the way from Allansford and astonishingly completed installing all of the glazing in one day! Just like that, the house was at lock up.

Also, “just like that”, the delivery driver who dropped off the scissor lift almost caved the entire front façade in when he tried to drive the machine full speed under the front beams and into the house! Lessons – be patient and be extremely careful who you let onto your work site.