Guest Blogger

This week the Nimmitabel blog will be written by a guest blogger.  Me.  Justin.

I went up on Monday the 31st of August with big plans of building a shed and sanding and finishing the floors of several rooms.  Having picked up some machinery to assist with the sanding, I arrived around lunch time. Well, I should know by now that these things always take three times as long as I think they will. Or possibly four.

You may recall previous reference in this blog to the controversial wall that creates a room between the upstairs hallway and the exit out onto the veranda.  It is a makeshift wall which does not appear to have been a part of the original plan.  I suspect that, having 13 children, the Tiveys were looking for places to put them and created this little room by blocking off that end of the hall with a temporary wall.  That wall has endured all this time.  Until now.

Lisa and I disagreed about whether or not to keep the wall.  I wanted it gone and Lisa wanted to keep it.  However, at the same time we disagreed about the layout of the rose garden that she wanted (I shan't bore you with the details of that disagreement).  In any case the compromise was that Lisa got the rose garden layout that she wanted and I got to remove the wall.

So that was my first task.  I took to the wall with a hammer (and, on occasion, a screwdriver).  I managed to remove the wall on Monday afternoon.  I retained the door as it matches the other doors in the house and we think that if we create a toilet beneath the stairs downstairs at the rear of the house the door would look good there.

Look, no more wall!

On Tuesday morning my mind turned to the impending arrival of a wooden shed that I had purchased with the assistance of the internet.  Lisa and I had discussed getting a shed which would allow us to get the tools out of the scullery.  My plan is to create some doors for the shelving in the scullery so that we can use the new cupboards for storage of plates and the like.

The shed would also hopefully provide space for a workbench upon which I could build said cupboard doors.

I had delusions that I would receive the pieces of shed and then spend the afternoon putting them together before standing back with a dry sherry to admire the new structure in the early evening.

As it turned out this was entirely delusional.

I spent the morning carting sand to the proposed site for the shed in an effort to level the ground.  I also rang Terry from Kingower who very helpfully agreed to help with the unloading process.

The truck arrived shortly before midday.  Gordon was there and he and I started unloading prior to Terry's arrival.  Terry then turned up and he and I unloaded the remainder of the pieces onto the street and then transported them (with the help of Terry's trolley) around into the garden.

Some of the shed lying in the gutter.

It became immediately apparent that I would be entirely unable to erect the shed by myself.  Some of the pieces were pretty big and could not possibly be manoeuvred by a single person.  We stacked the pieces behind the existing leisure/pizza oven shed.

A shed leaning against a shed.

Terry and I went to lunch at the pub and I contemplated my next move.

That afternoon I started knocking  the nails into the floor in the upstairs hallway in anticipation of sanding.  That turned out to be a task that would take substantially longer than I had anticipated.  I moved back and forth across the floor knocking each nail in in turn.  At the end of the afternoon I had moved about a third of the way down the hallway.

Tools for recessing nails.  And feet.

I started again on Wednesday morning.  I think it was sometime after lunch that I finished with the nails in the hallway.  Then I started sanding.  I had hired a floor sander which a managed to coax up the stairs by myself.  It was a very solid piece of machinery and when I first started using it I was a little concerned that it might somehow run out of control, so I treated it with caution.  The floorboards were somewhat warped and it seemed to take many many passes to get them anywhere near flat.  At the end of that afternoon I had run up and down over about half of the floor on multiple occasions and still hadn't managed to flatten the area sufficiently.

On the way.

On Thursday I sanded the floor all day.  By the end of the day I felt I was getting close.  I had managed to almost fill the bin with sawdust.  I was exhausted and, for the first time, couldn't be bothered starting a fire to keep me warm in the evening.

Getting closer.

On Friday I undertook some supplementary sanding of various hard to get to places and then started sanding the floor by hand.  In retrospect that was not a good idea.  Perhaps I was losing my grip by then.

Looking pretty good.

Terry kindly turned up again to help me get the floor sander down the stairs.  He brought a mandolin with him that he had told me about.  He has been restoring it and it is a beautiful instrument.

Some time ago I received my father's banjo ukulele and it has been sitting in its case in my study at home looking a bit dishevelled.  I asked Terry if he might be able to have a go at restoring it and he thought that he might.  I don't think it is a particularly virtuous instrument.  It is a George Formby brand instrument produced, no doubt, to cash in on his erstwhile popularity rather than to increase the sum total of beautiful musical instruments in the world.

However, it has sentimental value for me and I would very much like to see it returned to its former glory (such as it was).  I will take it up to Inglewood and see what Terry says.

I returned to Melbourne on Friday afternoon quite exhausted and a little dispirited by the amount I was able to achieve.  I had huddled in front of the fire in the evenings (except for Thursday) and had spent the vast majority of my time in my own company.  We plan to return next weekend with reinforcements.  I anticipate that the shed will be erected and the upstairs hallway floor will be filled and coated with tung oil.  But then, I should know by now that my ability to predict these things is very limited.