CHAPTER 9. LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (P.5)

The bushfire season ended at the end of May 2019 and I hit the ground running. Now it was time to focus on the work inside the house, the space where I felt my skill set was most suited, that of finer woodwork. During the fire season I had spotted a deal on facebook marketplace for a pile of recycled floorboards that were ripped out of an old basketball court in Camperdown. So I drove down to Camperdown and picked up the lot! So continued the tradition of driving everywhere and anywhere at the drop of a hat for recycled materials. It was worth it… most of the time.

I set up my dad’s 54 year old canvas scout tent as a workshop to protect the boards from the wet winter. Another chance marketplace purchase later and I had a second hand thicknesser setup in the tent too. After de-nailing thousands of nails by hand from over 600 lineal metres of boards, I started to painstakingly push them through the thicknesser. It took three passes to clean the paint off one side and another two passes to clean up the bottom side (the new top side) that’s roughly 3km of thicknessing!

When I started this floorboard cleaning process, Holly went on a trip home to the UK – she said goodbye to me in the tent and when she returned a month later, I greeted her in the same place, doing the exact same thing. It was quite possibly the most monotonous task of the entire project, but the results were totally worth it. Those boards now make up the kitchen drawer fronts, the kitchen ceiling & walls, the mezzanine flooring and the bedroom drawer fronts. It’s funny how far 600 lineal metres of floorboards will take you… from insanity to vanity.

Honestly, the lesson here is, sometimes there’s no choice but to swim up that river of shit with your mouth open – some jobs you just ain’t gonna like.

The 2019/20 fire season was rolling around fast! Knowing this time around that I wouldn’t have much time to get any work done on the house during the season I continued working furiously day in, day out. Working 6-7 day weeks for most of the off-season, I managed to get a lot done.

My brother Luke being a sparky was in charge of all things electrical for the house – we designed the lighting, switch and appliance layout together. He came down and we roughed in the house’s electricals.